Crossing the Gate: Everyday Lives of Women in Song Fujian (960–1279) by Man Xu (review)

Man Xu's book is a challenging study of gender and local history, an approach that allows her to incorporate rich archaeological findings that have been greatly neglected in the past and to pin down the factor of gender in the "localist turn" during the Song and Yuan period. She claims that the state and elites in the Song normally adopted a noninterference strategy in handling women's affairs and that women lived in a more woman-friendly society than would their counterparts under the Ming and Qing. They expanded their living spaces to include the broader local society, while they were expected to be, and indeed identified themselves as, responsible members of their households.

What was it like to be a "local" woman in Song Fujian? Xu examines women's residential, travel, and burial spaces, and acknowledges the indispensable role of women in local communities. Exemplary women, such as upright mothers, chaste wives and concubines, as well as filial daughters-in-law and daughters, had honorary tablets bestowed on their house gates and thus were integrated into local government's political propaganda and administration. Meanwhile, most women lacked interregional networks and resources, which made locally-focused engagement a significant part of their everyday life experience. Elite women influenced local administration through personal kinship ties, while they were also prone to being used by local governments to promote domestic morality. Female commoners were subordinated to local governmental administration, but they might also deliberately make contact with these local authorities to claim rights that were supposed to be guaranteed by the state. At the same time, spirituality was absent from the inner/outer gender framework defined by Confucianism, and thus the domesticity of religiosity did not entail any indication of confinement. Lastly, the "increasingly hardened gender hierarchy" (p. 13) did not carry over into the afterlife, and women's place in the afterlife was determined by local conditions, as well as by the preferences of individuals and their families.

In her book, Xu presents rich evidence and sophisticated analyses to help us understand what it meant to be local for women and men. She states that we are no longer able to reconstruct the concept of the "local" in a Song woman's mentality, which may have been significantly different from a man's (p. 262). That means that the task facing us is to reconstruct the concept of local women within the mentality of Song men. We have to find strategies to figure out the goals and historiography of local elites' and commoners' writings on local women, most of which have never been thoroughly examined. Xu is brave enough to be the pioneer in this field and is continuing to contribute to it.¹

A path-breaking article by Peter Bol has drawn our attention to the rise of local history, pointing out that the localist turn was first of all a change in historiography.² Xu does acknowledge how important the study of men's writing is for us to understand the rhetorical hierarchy embedded in the representation of women. She tackles the issue of why Song men included women in local histories, and correctly demonstrates that the local government intended to insert itself into the jia 家 by bestowing honorary tablets on exemplary women in the Song, while local elites mentioned female relatives and local female residents to demonstrate domestic morality. She also observes the central government's interest in controlling local affairs and institutionalizing local regulations during the Yuan dynasty, assuming that "from the Yuan on, local awards assumed auxiliary roles and were gradually reduced to subordinate status" (p. 29).

In order to reveal the attitudes of local government and elites towards local women, Xu explores a wide range of material from the long Song-Yuan-Ming transition. For example, only...