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Women’s Characters: Calligraphy as a Source for Women’s History Hu Ying Calligraphy occupies a peculiar position in the lives of pre-modern Chinese women. On the one hand, unlike sewing and embroidery, the practice of which constituted one of the four accepted feminine virtues, calligraphy was not extolled as a proper use of women’s time. On the other hand, because it was part of a basic educational curriculum, we can safely assume that most literate daughters of a gentry family were taught it; and to state the obvious, because calligraphy was the only medium of writing, any women who wrote (letters, poetry, etc.) were automatically practitioners of calligraphy, regardless of their actual level of achievement in the art. Therefore unlike more specialized studies such as painting, it was a widely shared, possibly fairly routinized activity. Further, from the inception of the calligraphic tradition, women artists played significant roles in forming and transmitting the tradition, arguably more than in other arts. By late imperial times, there were thousands of accounts, albeit mostly brief, of women who excelled in the art.1 More enticing still, some of their work survives to this day, in the forms of private letters, colophons, presents, hand-copied books and scrolls of sutras, etc. These historical traces thus hold out to us a tempting promise of extraordinary access: to women’s artistic practice, to their daily lives, even to traces of their physical movements, preserved in serial snapshots, as it were, in the actual lines and dots of their characters on paper. This study is a preliminary examination of calligraphy as a source in the study of women’s history, with examples mainly drawn from the early decades of the twentieth century. The initial impulse of my research comes from Lothar Ledderose’s illuminating argument that calligraphy played a key role in sustaining the social cohesiveness of the literati class over two millennia.2 If we follow his argument, then through the same frequent intimate experience of brush, stone, ink and 436 | Overt and Covert Treasures paper, literate women were physically, socially, and aesthetically, that is to say very effectively, interpolated into the center of Chinese literati culture. In the same spirit of taking seriously the connection between aesthetic aspects and social function, I raise three sets of questions in this study: 1) Is there gender in calligraphy? That is to say, rather than assuming a priori that gender must play a major role in calligraphy, I follow Gail Hershatter’s recent reminder that gender functions as a meaning-making category, and as such is at times significant and at other times appears to recede in importance.3 I believe this is demonstrably true in the interpretation and presentation of women artists’ calligraphy. The question then becomes: when and why does gender appear and disappear? 2) What can calligraphy tell us about the history of Chinese women that other, better-studied sources such as poetry and biography cannot? In other words, what are the ways that we can productively interpret the generic specificity of calligraphy? Unlike verbal art and material culture, calligraphy is simultaneously linguistic and visual; or to put in another way, it contains both semantic and aesthetic aspects. The major challenge here is to interpret not just what the women calligraphers wrote but how they wrote, in terms of choice of models to study, choice of script, and manners of circulation and collection, etc. A closely related issue is the context of a given piece of calligraphic art, and there are several to consider: the context of the original writers, that of the collectors and connoisseurs, and finally that of the woman historians like ourselves. 3) Is there a significant difference in the way calligraphy was practiced by women at the end of the imperial era from the way it was practiced in the two millennia prior? In other words, given that the early twentieth century is usually described as a transitional period between traditional and modern eras, can we see traces of modernity in the practice of women artists, or is it no more than an antiquarian practice unrelated to the modern condition? To put it more specifically: how does women’s calligraphy practice fit into the larger picture of the historical transformation of modern China? HISTORICAL OVERVIEW Analogous to their position within the canonical tradition of poetry as mystic authors of Odes, women have been closely associated with [3.144.48.135] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 10:49 GMT...

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