Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial ChinaIn this feminist history of eight centuries of private life in China, Francesca Bray inserts women into the history of technology and adds technology to the history of women. Bray takes issue with the Orientalist image that traditional Chinese women were imprisoned in the inner quarters, deprived of freedom and dignity, and so physically and morally deformed by footbinding and the tyrannies of patriarchy that they were incapable of productive work. She proposes a concept of gynotechnics, a set of everyday technologies that define women's roles, as a creative new way to explore how societies translate moral and social principles into a web of material forms and bodily practices. Bray examines three different aspects of domestic life in China, tracing their developments from 1000 to 1800 A.D. She begins with the shell of domesticity, the house, focusing on how domestic space embodied hierarchies of gender. She follows the shift in the textile industry from domestic production to commercial production. Despite increasing emphasis on women's reproductive roles, she argues, this cannot be reduced to childbearing. Female hierarchies within the family reinforced the power of wives, whose responsibilities included ritual activities and financial management as well as the education of children. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998. In this feminist history of eight centuries of private life in China, Francesca Bray inserts women into the history of technology and adds technology to the history of women. Bray takes issue with the Orientalist image that traditional Chinese women were |
Contents
| 1 | |
BUILDING A TRADITION THE CONSTRUCTION OF CHINESE SOCIAL SPACE | 49 |
House Form and Meaning | 59 |
Material Design | 70 |
Some Aesthetics of House Design | 76 |
Rus in Domo | 83 |
The Convergence of Architecture | 88 |
Encoding Patriarchy | 91 |
Skills Knowledge and Status | 237 |
Womanly Virtue and the Preservation of the Social Order | 240 |
Womens Work and Family Status | 242 |
Cloth and the Separation of Spheres | 250 |
Womens Work and Patriarchy | 259 |
MEANINGS OF MOTHERHOOD REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES AND THEIR USES | 263 |
Medical History and Gender History | 273 |
The Question of Efficacy | 280 |
A Moral Building Block | 93 |
I | 94 |
Altar and Stove | 96 |
The Coffin and the Bed | 114 |
Marking the Moral Order | 122 |
The Text of the Chinese House | 151 |
Textual Experts | 159 |
WOMENS WORK WEAVING NEW PATTERNS IN THE SOCIAL FABRIC | 171 |
Fabrics of Power The Canonical Meanings of Womens Work | 181 |
Cloth and Society | 185 |
Medieval Divisions of Labor and the Value of Female Work | 189 |
Economic Expansion and Changing Divisions of Labor | 204 |
The Cotton Boom | 210 |
Silk Production in the Ming and Qing | 224 |
Womens Work and Womens Place | 235 |
What is a Body? | 287 |
Physicians Orthodoxy and Power | 292 |
Whose Voices? | 300 |
Reproductive Medicine and the Dual Nature of Fertility | 305 |
Generation in Medical Theory | 306 |
Orthodox Uses of Abortion | 309 |
A Dual Image of Womanhood | 310 |
Reproductive Hierarchies | 317 |
A Qualified Blessing | 318 |
Nature Nurture and the Bond between Mother and Child | 325 |
Wives Concubines and Maids | 333 |
The Wifely Role | 338 |
Gynotechnics and Civilization | 347 |
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Common terms and phrases
abortion agriculture amenorrhea ancestors argues birth bolt building century child Chinese house cloth concubine Confucian contributed cotton courtyard culture daughters domain domestic drugs dynasty early Ebrey economic educated elite embroidery farming female fertility Furth gender geomancy Hangzhou hierarchies household Huang Huangdi neijing husband important inner quarters kinship Kuhn late imperial China late imperial period late Ming Li Yu lineage living loom lower Yangzi Lu Ban male manorial marriage material medicine Ming and Qing moral mother natural neo-Confucian orthodoxy patriarchal patrilineal peasant physicians polygyny poor popular practices pregnancy Qing Qing Customs raw silk reeling regions reproductive rice role Ruitenbeek rural scholars seclusion sericulture shrine silkworms Sima Guang skills social society Song Song dynasty space status stove Suzhou symbol tabbies techniques textile textile production texts tion Tong weavers weaving wife wives woman women yarn Yuan Zhang Zhu Xi