Pursuing Talent and Virtue: Education and Women's Culture in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century China

PURSUING TALENT AND VIRTUE: EDUCATION AND WOMEN'S CULTURE IN SEVENTEENTH- AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHINA* Dorothy Ko According to a popular formulation of the seventeenth century, "a woman is virtuous only if she is untalented." This saying encapsulates one extreme view of the purpose and program of women's education as it was conceptualized during this time.1 Subscribed to both by men and women, this view construed a woman's talents (cai) and virtues (de) to be mutually exclusive , and suggested that an advanced literary and cultural education was detrimental to her moral cultivation. Disseminated through the precepts for women purveyed by the commercial presses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this view was reiterated so often that many modern-day readers assume it to be the only basis for interpreting women's education in traditional China.2 Paradoxically, this saying gained currency at the very time that the ranks of educated women were swelling. In this article, I argue that this formulation merely describes one vision or ideal of women's education, not the reality that many daughters of the gentry class experienced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I focus on the emergence of a new theory and practice of women's education, the premise of which was that talent and virtue were compatible and in fact mutually reinforcing. Women themselves played crucial roles in this education: mothers and aunts approached the task of educating girls with a sense of mission; daughters wrote essays and poems *I wish to thank Hal Kahn, Marilyn Young, Bill Rowe, Pat Ebrey, Paul Ropp and participants in the colloquium for their helpful comments. In particular, I express my special appreciation to Susan Mann, who initiated me into the brave new world of women's history a decade ago. 1Although its origins have often been attributed to the Song, this saying, and several variations of it, did not appear until the seventeenth century. Chen 1928: 188-93. Du Fangqin, author of a Chinese monograph on the position of women in Chinese history, has argued that the early Chinese before the Western Zhou period subscribed to the ideal of unity of talent and virtue for women. The subsequent subjugation of talent to virtue was rooted in the domestication of women. Du 1988: 170-72. Late Imperial China Vol. 13, No. 1 (June 1992): 9-39© by the Society for Qing Studies 9 10Dorothy Ko defending the propriety of both literary and moral education for themselves and other women. This woman-centered education constituted the germ of a culture of literate women. Relatively speaking, the number of women educated in the seventeenth century remained small.3 But the interest taken by the burgeoning commercial printing industry in the works of woman writers certainly suggests that literate women were enjoying unprecedented visibility. For the first time in Chinese history, a considerable number of women managed to have their works published during their own lifetimes. This new visibility of women's talent, more important than their absolute numbers, provoked debates on women's education and, by extension, the true nature of a woman's calling. These debates, as I will show, only addressed the proper balance between cultural and moral cultivation. The propriety of women's education was never challenged. In my forthcoming book, I discuss a broad range of issues such as the impact of the printing industry on the rise of woman writers, the effects of reading and writing on women's self-perceptions, women's roles as producers and consumers of culture, and the relationship between women's culture and the male-centered official kinship structure. In this article, therefore, I will limit my focus to the arguments developed by gentry women vindicating their enlightenment, and the approaches taken by mothers and aunts, practitioners of that education. The purpose of this article, in other words, is to illuminate the theory and practice of women's education as seen by women themselves. The picture that emerges, I shall argue, is quite different from the one we can glean from the didactic literature, or from records left by their fathers, husbands and sons. Woman as Everyday Strategist A woman's view of her world, rife...