The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (review)

Reviews 393 NOTES1. Some ofthe works that might have been discussed more fully in this regard include: Stephen Endicott, Red Earth: Revolution in a Sichuan Village (Toronto: New Canada Press, 1989); Lowell Dittmer, China's Post-Liberation Epoch, 1949-1981 (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1987); Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins ofthe Cultural Revolution, vol. 2, The Great Leap Forward, 1958-1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Frederick Teiwes, Politics and Purges in China: Rectification and the Decline ofParty Norms, 1950-1965 (White Plains, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1980); and the essays by Kenneth Lieberthal, Nicholas Lardy, Suzanne Pepper, and Merle Goldman in The Cambridge History ofChina, vol. 14, The People's Republic, Part One: The Emergence ofRevolutionary China, 1949-1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). mm Patricia Buckley Ebrey. The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives ofChinese Women in the SungPeriod. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1993. xviii, 332 pp. Hardcover $45.00, isbn 0-520-08156-0. Paperback $16.00, isbn isbn 0-520-08158-7.© 1996 by University ofHawai'i Press Sophisticated and analytical, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives ofChinese Women in the SungPeriod by Patricia B. Ebrey is a fascinating work on the place ofwomen in Chinese social history. Radier than examining the role ofwomen in court politics and dieir image in philosophy, religion, literature, and art, as some previous studies have done, Ebrey focuses on how marriage shaped women's lives, observing that "the overwhelming majority ofSung women married and had no public career" and that "to understand the lives ofthe majority ofwomen, we must look at diem where they were—in the home" (p. 7). Thanks to developments in education, the invention ofprinting, and the wider distribution of books, there is a much richer body ofmaterials on these matters for the Sung than for earlier times. Drawing on a wide variety ofsources including funerary biographies , advice books, collections ofpoetry, prose essays, gossipy anecdotes, paintings, and archaeological discoveries, in addition to official histories, collections ofgovernment documents, and die Sung code, Ebrey skillfully reconstructs a history ofSung women in fifteen chapters. She begins with "Separating the Sexes" and "Meanings ofMarriage" to explain how the traditional yin-yang and outer-inner dichotomy dominated Chinese thinking, and moves on to discuss every stage in married Ufe including second marriage, concubinage, and divorce. The Sung dynasty is known for the drastic changes that took place in society from earlier times: the emergence ofan educated gentry class in place ofaristocratic dominance, the revival ofConfucianism, and widespread commercializa- 394 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 tion and urbanization. One of Ebrey's goals is to reveal the complexities of such a changing society. We see indeed a highly complex world in which multifaceted, ambiguous, and often opposed ideas coexisted in a way that gave people room to maneuver (p. 9). In Sung China, Ebrey shows convincingly that the Neo-Confucian emphasis on separating the sexes kept women more than ever out of the public sphere while at the same time it further empowered women in the domestic sphere by legitimizing their authority in the home. One of Ebrey's claims is that an increased demand for sons-in-law who showed promise to rise through the civil service examinations led to an escalation in the size of dowries, which in turn enhanced women's standing and provided them some financial security, since, at the time, a woman's right to treat the dowry as her personal property was recognized in law. Because women's rights to property enabled them to have undue power and independence, the growth of dowries generated opposition from officials and Confucian scholars. Such opposition caused women's claims to their dowries to be legally curbed by die Yuan and Ming governments. The inability to provide large dowries also led to an increase in the numbers of spinsters and even to female infanticide. Sung commercialization and the demand for silk as subsidies to the neighboring Northern Dynasties increased the demand for textiles and enabled women to have more opportunities to gain cash. It became possible for some Sung women to make an independent living by spinning and weaving. Legends attributed the introduction of...