1450-1750 East Asia

Womens Rights in Ming China

Source: Stearns, Peter N. Gender In World History. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000.)
pp. 677-678.
At most levels of Chinese society, the Ming period continued the subordination of youths
to elders and women to men that had been steadily intensifying in earlier periods.
Even within the palace, the plight of most women was grim. Hundreds, sometimes
thousands of attractive young women were brought to the court in the hope that they would catch
the emperors fancy and become one of his concubines or perhaps even be elevated to the status
of wife. Because few actually succeeded, many spent their lives in loneliness and inactivity, just
waiting for the emperor to glance their way.
In society at large, women had to settle for whatever status and respect they could win
within the family. As before, their success in this regard hinged largely on bearing male children
and, when they were married, moving from the status of daughter-in-law to mother-in-law. The
daughters of upper-class families were often taught to read and write by their parents or brothers,
and many composed poetry, painted, and played musical instruments. But as in earlier centuries,
even well read women were barred from taking the civil service exams and obtaining positions in
the bureaucracy.
Although women from the non-elite classes still worked the fields and in some areas sold
goods in the local market, the main avenues for some degree of independence and selfexpression remained becoming courtesans or entertainers. The former should be clearly
distinguished from prostitutes in that they served a very different clientele and were literate and
often accomplished in painting, music, and poetry. Even the most successful courtesans made
their living by gratifying the needs of upper class men for uninhibited sex and companionship.
But they often enjoyed lives of luxury and much greater personal freedom than even women
from scholar-gentry households.

Womens and Labor Roles in Ming China

Source: Bray, Francesca. Technology and Gender, Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial
China. (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1997) pp. 175, 180-181, 237
Womens work in China was classically defined as the making of textiles; the inner quarters
were identified not as a zone of dependence but as a site of essential productive activity. The
technical and management skills that went into producing cloth, whether simple weaves or
highly valued patterned fabrics, were considered a female domain of knowledge well into the
Song. However, the Song dynasty saw the beginnings of a sustained trend toward
commercialization and specialization in textile production. New divisions of labor brought about
the progressive marginalization of womens real and perceived contribution to this economic
sector. The process was slow, complex and uneven, but by the end of the Ming, weaving of all
but subsistence homespuns had essentially become a male task.
In China, the expansion and elaboration of the economy that began during the Song also
brought about significant and in some ways parallel reformulations of gender roles. By the end
of the late imperial period Chinese women were no longer represented as making significant

independent contributions to material production, even though the majority of them continued to
work hard at productive tasks. This was a dramatic contrast to the classical formulation of the
gender division of labor, which had represented womens work as being as essential as mens,
both to human survival and to the maintenance of a well-ordered state.
The masking or marginalization of womens economic contributions through new
divisions of labor is not a uniquely Chinese phenomenon. It is a process familiar from many
other societies in transition to a commercialized economy. In The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State, Engels argued that in the process of social differentiation which
accompanied the development of the means of production and private rights to property, women
became restricted to an unwaged sphere of socially recognized productive work. In this way
women lost the status of full social adults to become subordinate wives and wards.
From Engels on, Marxist and feminist scholars have argued that the reduced importance
accorded to womens work under the pressures of commercialization and proto-industrialization
has been a central factor in the consolidation of patriarchy around the world.

Gender Roles and Social Status in Tokugawa Japan

Marjorie Wall Bingham and Susan Hill Gross, Women in Japan: From Ancient Tines to the Present [St. Louis Park,
MN, Glenhurst Publications, Inc., 1987], pp. 102-103.

As a general rule, gender roles are more rigid in today's Japan than they were for most Japanese
of the 1850s. As a baseline for examining major changes, let us survey the situation in late
Tokugawa times.
In the Elite (Samurai) Class: Wives could be divorced for any of the following reasons:
disobedience.
lewdness.
jealousy.
leprosy.
talking too much.
stealing.
The husband could decide when these conditions had been met and could simply hand his wife a
three and one-half line written notice--she would have to leave. She was not allowed to take her
children with her. These Japanese women had no grounds for divorcing their husbands. In cases
of abuse, the best a wife might do was to escape to a Buddhist convent.
or
Under the restrictive Tokugawa code, adultery committed by a wife was punishable by death,
while a husband might keep women as concubines in his own home--and have other sexual
affairs without restrictions. The constant advice to young girls to grow up and to be obedient
wives might be seen as teaching future wives a necessary survival skill for the time they entered
a world that denied them any essential marriage rights.
or

Women of the Tokugawa were limited in their physical movements, right to property, and
marital rights. They were also restricted in their most basic right--that of being allowed an
education to become a complete adult person. . . . (

For the vast majority of Japanese women

in Tokugawa times. Bingham and Gross make the
common error of assuming that the norms of the samurai
class (approximately 7% of the total population) applied
to "the Japanese" as a whole. They do point out that the
situation was especially severe for samurai as compared
with other social groups. In fact, however, nearly all
indications point to a vast difference in lifestyles and
social circumstances between samurai women (and, to a
lesser extent, women in rich merchant households,
which often imitated samurai) and ordinary women. In
other words, the above passages have little or no validity when speaking about 80-90% of the
population.
As a general rule, the higher one's social status, the more rigid were the gender roles. In other
words, the activities and social spheres of men versus women were more distinct and separate
among social elites. Furthermore, men tended to enjoy greater privilege and prestige vis--vis
women at the upper end of the social spectrum. Conversely, among ordinary people, especially
among ordinary peasants, who comprised the majority of the population in Tokugawa times,
gender roles tended to overlap extensively and a higher degree of legal and economic equality
prevailed among women and men in society. summarizes the situation. To understand this
relationship in more concrete terms let us examine the following three areas: 1) division and
value of labor; 2) formal authority, including divorce; and 3) sexual freedom and customs.
Division and Value of Labor
From the Tokugawa period into the mid-twentieth century, both productive work, which
sustained the [household] by producing essential goods and income, and reproductive work
(childrearing, cooking, and house-keeping), which maintained [household] members, took place
at home. In Tokugawa times, especially in rural areas, the productive and reproductive tasks
were interchangeable between men and women. There was a tendency for men to perform
certain tasks more often than women and vice versa, but both did both kinds of work when the
home and workplace were in the same physical location.
Among many samurai, especially elite samurai (as opposed to rank-and-file foot soldiers), as
well as among the wealthiest merchants, there was typically a separation between home and
work. A clear division of labor along gender lines prevailed among these Japanese (totaling
approximately 10% of the population), with women in charge of reproductive work in the inner
sphere of the home and men charged with productive work in the outer realm of society.
Among these Japanese (and only these Japanese) Chinese-derived Confucian norms informed
conceptions of ideal gender roles from approximately the early eighteenth century onward. One
influential book among Tokugawa-period elites was a short treatise called the Onna daigaku
(The Great Learning for women--a title derived from the Chinese classic the Daigaku, which is
usually called the Great Learning in English). Among other things, this work called for a rigid
separation between men and women: Whether even elite Japanese households actually lived up
to such rigid ideals is doubtful, but, in theory at least, they tried.
Sexual Behavior and Degrees of Sexual Freedom

An assertion regarding adultery by wives as being punishable by death would have applied only
to the samurai class, and, only to the upper levels of the samurai class. The situation for the
majority of the population was much less stark--at least in Tokugawa times.
To summarize, notice that there are two major trends in operation within the realm of
relations between men and women. The first pertains to social status. Among social elites,
gender-based rules tended to be rigid and unequal. This was indeed the classic maledominated society that is so often, and incorrectly, extrapolated to the whole of Japan.
Among the majority of Japanese, however, the situation was nearly opposite. The gap in
lifestyles