Yuan Mei (1716–98) on Women

Background

In addition to his fame as a poet, prose writer, and literary critic, Yuan Mei is well known today as one of the most important promoters of women’s writing in eighteenth-century China.¹ However, Yuan Mei’s advocacy of women’s writing is only one part of a whole range of unconventional ideas that he held regarding women, ideas that caused him to favor many changes in the ways women were treated and to engage in a wide-ranging reevaluation of the position of women in the earlier literary and historical tradition. Although Yuan’s thoughts and actions were often contradictory, many of his ideas resemble positions that came to be held widely in China only during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and, hence, are worthy of a detailed examination.

By the age of Yuan Mei, attitudes about women had already begun to change among the more affluent members of society. One result of the changes was a great growth in female participation in literary activities (particularly the writing of classical poetry) during the late Ming and early Qing.² The Complete Tang Poems (Quan Tangshi) contains only about 600 poems by women out of a total of more than 48, 900.³ In contrast, Hu Wenkai’s study of Qing-dynasty female writers lists the names of about four thousand women whose collected works existed at one time or another.⁴ Although many of these have been lost, one can imagine the amount of writing that was done (perhaps a minimum of a hundred or so poems per collection), and it is probably no exaggeration to say that more poetry was written by women in Yuan Mei’s eighteenth century than in the twentieth.⁵

At first courtesan writers played a predominant role in this phenomenal growth in women’s writing,⁶ but by the beginning of the Qing dynasty, an emphasis on combining domestic virtue and literature in such seventeenth-century female writers as Shang Jinglan (fl. mid-seventeenth c.) and Wang Duanshu (fl. 1650) brought the writing of gentry women to the fore and marginalized poetry by courtesans.⁷ In the eighteenth century more and more women of good family were writing classical poetry, and the numbers only grew after Yuan Mei’s age, including such distinguished writers as Wang Duan (1793–1839), Wu Zao (dates uncertain), and Gu Taiqing (1799–ca. 1875).⁸

No doubt some of this growth in women’s writing was related to changing attitudes among male writers. Back in the sixteenth century, the radical Ming thinker Li Zhi (1527–1602) had argued that women are the intellectual equals of men, and the famous late Ming poet Zhong Xing (1574–1624) had stated that poetry by women is superior to that of men.⁹ During the late seventeenth century literati poets like Qian Qianyi (1582–1664) strongly encouraged their courtesan lovers in their literary activities, and in 1657 Wang Shizhen (1634–1711), the most widely read early Qing poet today, had welcomed many female writers to his Autumn Willow Poetry Assembly (Qiuliu shihui) held by the side of Daming Lake in Jinan.¹⁰ By the end of the eighteenth century Yuan Mei and Chen Wenshu (1775–1845) were vigorously promoting the writing of classical verse by women.¹¹ Of even greater significance for the eventual transformation of women’s lives in later ages, some eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century male authors went far beyond the promotion of women’s writing and began attacking traditional restrictions on women’s lives, a tendency which reached a first climax in the work of Yu Zhengxie (1775–1840), who opposed both concubinage and foot-binding.¹²

Perhaps even more fundamental to the growth of women’s writing than the promotion of famous male writers was a great expansion of women’s literacy.¹³ According to traditional wisdom, “a woman without talent is virtuous” (nüzi wucai bianshi de), and book-learning was thought to be harmful to women. However, by the late Ming period more and more parents taught their daughters how to read basic textbooks designed to...