Overt and Covert Treasures: Essays on the Sources for Chinese Women’s History

2. How the History of Women in Early China Intersects with the History of Science in Early China

How the History of Women in Early China Intersects with the History of Science in Early China Lisa Raphals At first the received history of science in China seems to have little place for women, especially in early China. Reconsiderations of the history of science in China and the status of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China have not addressed this question. I begin with the question of what we mean by the history of science in China as it relates to women. I next survey what scientific disciplines and texts provide sources on women, either as practitioners or as consultants. I then review sources on women in (1) medicine, (2) the so-called shushu 數術 culture of numbers, divination and longevity practices described in the Hanshu yiwenzhi 漢書藝文志, and (3) the evidence from excavated texts. INTRODUCTION: WOMEN AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN CHINA It is useful to begin by asking what we mean by science. Are we looking at “science” or technology? Which sciences, and in what hierarchy of value of knowledge? As is well known, there has been an ongoing debate about the nature of Chinese science, reflection on the pioneering work of Joseph Needham, and what has been referred to as the “Needham problem”: variants on the question of why (or whether) the scientific revolution that transformed scientific disciplines in Europe did not take place in China. That debate, in its various forms, would appear to have nothing to do with women. It focused, in its European form, on the mathematization of science, and on the activities of court astronomical officials, who did not include women. A second question to arise in considering the history of sciences in China is: of which ones? The plural is deliberate, since, as Nathan 36 | Overt and Covert Treasures Sivin has argued, Chinese accounts focused on sciences, rather than on a unified notion of science. Sivin breaks down the quantitative sciences into three disciplines: mathematics (suan 算), mathematical harmonics or acoustics (lü 律 or lülü 律呂) and mathematical astronomy (li 歷 or lifa 歷 法), considered related to harmonics. He describes the qualitative sciences as: astrology (tianwen 天文), observation of celestial and meteorological events to rectify political order; medicine (yi 醫), including macrobiotics (yangsheng 養生) and materia medica (bencao 本草); alchemy, internal (neidan 內丹) and external (waidan 外丹); and siting (fengshui 風水).1 Shushu Culture Turning to indigenous classifications of knowledge, we may consider what has been called shushu culture. This rubric refers to the fifth and sixth sections of the Hanshu yiwenzhi, or Bibliographic Treatise.2 They are divided into the following subsections. Table 1: Categories of the Hanshu Bibliographic Treatise Section 1 The Six Arts (liuyi 六藝), or Six Classics (liujing 六經) Section 2 The Masters (zhuzi 諸子), the texts of Warring States philosophy Section 3 Poetry (shifu 詩賦) Section 4 Military Works (bingshu 兵書) Section 5 Numbers and Techniques (shushu 數術). Including: (1) Celestial patterns (tianwen 天文). Divination by the stars and weather phenomena (clouds, mists, qi configurations), mapping the constellations (2) Calendars and chronologies (lipu 歷譜). Calendric computations and movements of the heavenly bodies (divinatory and otherwise) (3) Five phases (wuxing 五行). Five-phase and yinyang divination (including portents, hemerology, calendric astrology) (4) Milfoil and turtle-shell (shigui 蓍龜). Turtle-shell and yarrow divination, including the Zhouyi, the original text of the Yijing (5) Miscellaneous divination (zazhan 雜占) (6) Morphoscopy (xingfa 刑法). Works on geography, physiognomy, topomancy History of Women—History of Science | 37 Section 6 Recipes and Methods (fangji 方技). Works on medicine and longevity (1) Medical classics (yijing 醫經) (2) Classical recipes (jingfang 經方) (3) Sexual arts (fangzhong 房中) (4) Immortality practices (shenxian 神仙) Which are part of the history of women? It is striking that the indigenous areas of Chinese science that seem most applicable to women, as subjects or objects, are the qualitative sciences, the very ones that were sidelined by the discourse of the scientific revolution. (To these we might add crafts such as sericulture and weaving, but they are beyond the scope of the present discussion.) Here there are problems, which time does not permit us to consider in detail. A useful guide to some of these questions is Londa Schiebinger’s The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science.3 Schiebinger examines a wide range of arguably “scientific” activities of women which have tended to fall below the radar of standard history of science. These include work in craft traditions, midwifery, cookbooks (and their relations to pharmacopeia), and the professionalization of science that eventually barred women who effectively practiced as physicians, mathematicians...