Six
Grooming a Daughter for Marriage
Brides and Wives in the Mid-Ch'ing Period

Susan Mann

The bride's dowry at eighteen means nothing;
The grandmother's funeral at eighty tells all.
—NINGPO SAYING (HO CHU 1973:227)

Marriage was the ladder of success for women in late imperial China. Even the bride who began with a modest wedding ("three cups of weak tea and a bow at the family shrine") could end her life in bounty ("mouth full of sweetcakes, playing with grandsons"). A lavish dowry nonetheless meant something: it testified to the bride's family's status (Harrell and Dickey 1985), and it was likely to complement generous betrothal gifts, one gauge of the groom's ability to provide for a daughter's long-term security (Parish and Whyte 1978:180-83). In a society that frowned upon remarriage, an extravagant dowry marked a family's confidence that their daughter would marry only once. In addition, dowry provided an awesome public display, enabling the dowered bride to enter her new home with style and dignity. Perhaps most important of all, dowry that clearly matched or exceeded the likely betrothal gifts and wedding costs shouldered by the groom's family meant that the bride was not being sold. The pervasive traffic in women is described elsewhere in this volume by Rubie Watson and Gail Hershatter. The dowered bride belonged to that select category of women who were "espoused by betrothal" (p'in tse wei ch'i ), chosen for their virtue to become wives, distinguished forever from concubines or courtesans.^[1]

During the mid-Ch'ing period, dowry was the hallmark of a respectable wedding. Commoners went into debt and postponed marriages in order to dower their daughters in style. Whereas during the Sung period, as discussed in Ebrey's chapter here, the dowry was above all an upper-class

concern—families complained about expensive dowries because they dissipated corporate estates—in Ch'ing times dowry givers quite clearly included families of more modest means. Such households might exhaust their resources to marry off a daughter, a practice that also caused upper-class writers to complain, as we see in the following remarks written by Ch'en Hung-mou in the middle of the eighteenth century:

When it comes to marriage, people care only about keeping up with the times. They spend extravagantly on material things. When they present betrothal gifts (p'in ) or make up a dowry (lien-tseng ), the embroidered silks and satins and the gold and pearls are matched one for one. Utensils and articles for the home and business are the finest and the most expensive, and they must be beautifully made as well. The decorated pavilion to welcome the bride and her elegant sedan chair, the banquet where the two families meet and exchange gifts, all require the most fantastic outlays of cash. One sees the worst of this among poorer people, who will borrow heavily to give the appearance of having property, all for the sake of a single public display, ignoring the needs of the "eight mouths" at home. Families with daughters are the most burdened; the families with sons can procrastinate and put off [marriage plans].

Ch'en thought it would be a good idea if everyone limited dowry processions to six chests, an unlikely proposition in an area where twenty chests was apparently de rigueur.^[2]

Concern about dowry was only one aspect of the bitter competition for status that pervaded eighteenth-century life. This competition produced an unusual series of conversations about wives and brides in the writings of mid-Ch'ing intellectuals. Their conversations, which appear in a variety of texts (didactic, political, and scholarly), are reminiscent of Victorian writings on the subject of women. Like the Victorians, mid-Ch'ing writers valorized the woman's role as wife, manager, and guardian of the "inner apartments." In fixing the place of wives in the domestic sphere, they also sought to fix the fluidity of social change that threatened to erode the boundaries defining their own respectability. In questioning classical conventions governing women's behavior, they simultaneously reasserted those same conventions. In this essay I shall argue that their conversations about women and marriage were a metonymic comment on larger social issues of mobility and class during the eighteenth century.

The conversations—which I shall call a "new discourse on marriage"—were part of the Confucian revival of the mid-Ch'ing period, a revival that reached down through the ranks of the commoner classes and focused on the family. Among the scholar-elite, "textual research" or "Han Learning" called attention to the original language of ancient canonical works, including marriage rituals and kinship terminology. Even commoners who could bare-

ly read were caught up in the revival because of state propaganda campaigns promoting a common ideal of domestic life that emphasized wifely fidelity and service. The state campaigns contributed in turn to a growing interest in compiling genealogies and family instruction books for upper-class households and those newly arrived at respectable status. As a result of these conditions—which affected scholarship, official duties, and personal writing—the elite men who presided over large families were led to ponder and comment anew on the ambiguous position of women in the Chinese family system.^[3]

At the heart of the concern about family was the remarkable social mobility, both upward and downward, that marked the mid-Ch'ing era. Evidence for mobility comes from the revival of commerce and the flourishing of trade guilds; from the growth of new literati occupations outside formal government office; from an apparent rise in literacy rates among women as well as men; and from complaints about affluence, conspicuous consumption, and "petty" competition in the literary arts (Ho 1962; Naquin and Rawski 1987:58-59, 114-33). Surely the most striking development with respect to mobility in the mid-Ch'ing era was the series of imperial edicts eradicating the final remaining hereditary class barrier in Chinese society. Beginning in 1723, members of certain occupational and regional groups listed in the household registers as chien, or "debased," were declared eligible for commoner status once they had "purified" their family lines by abstention from polluting work for three generations (Terada 1959). Though the edicts did not eliminate "debased" status groups, I believe the promised emancipation of the lowborn and the intense scrutiny of "pure" blood lines that attended their proposed assimilation into the commoner classes were crucial elements in the changing consciousness this essay examines.

In sum, anxiety about blurred boundaries of all kinds—including the boundaries between "respectable" (liang ) and "polluted" (chien ) women—informed the conversations we are about to explore and gave them special urgency. At stake was not only the purity of marriage markets but also the reproduction of status in a competitive society. Classical revival, moral rebirth, and the unprecedented mobility of women throughout the stratification system prompted enormous concern about how to keep women in their place. Yet these conversations were only partly about women's roles within the family. They were also about marriage and the market: about reaffirming the endogamous marriage markets of the scholar-elite to exclude interlopers, and to distinguish educated women of the upper class from their cultivated sisters in the courtesans' salons. The literati writers of this era identified wives and daughters alike as women who carried forward the status of their families and the honor of their class in the face of threats from all sides.

Han Learning and the Recovery of Classical Marriage Norms

The scholars of the Han Learning movement looked to pre-Sung texts for guidance as they sought the "original" pure meaning of Confucian norms and language. Among their rediscoveries was abundant material on the meaning of marriage. The Li chi, the I li, and the Po-hu t'ung, all important Han texts widely cited and read by these scholars, emphasized marriage as a rite of adulthood and stressed the proper preparation and education of women for marriage. A review of these texts will indicate the scope of their appeal in the mid-Ch'ing period.

Han texts describe marriage as a ritual that simultaneously marked the individual's entry into a world of adult responsibility and reconstituted the conjugal fulcrum of family life. As the next generation entered adulthood, moreover, the elder generation prepared to step aside. Even though mourning and burial were ranked higher in the ritual order, and even though a funeral usually cost more than a wedding, marriage was recognized as the "root," or foundation, of all ritual.^[4] According to the Li chi (Book of Rites), marriage marked the second of the series of crucial ceremonies in the individual life cycle, following the ritual capping (for boys) and the ceremonial hairpinning (for girls). The "Ch'ü li" (Summary of Rules of Propriety) chapter says: "When one is ten years old, we call him a boy; he goes [out] to school. When he is twenty, we call him a youth; he is capped. When he is thirty, we say, 'He is at his maturity'; he has a wife" (Legge 1967 1:65; LC 1:4b).^[5] A later passage, in the "Nei tse" (Pattern of the Family) chapter, elaborates on the significance of this transition to "maturity" at marriage: "At thirty, he had a wife, and began to attend to the business proper to a man. He extended his learning without confining it to particular subjects. He was deferential to his friends, having regard to the aims (which they displayed)" (Legge 1967 1:478-79; LC 12:15b).

The early years of marriage, then, for men marked the expansion of social networks and broad programs of study that prepared them for an official post (the next transition, conventionally said to begin at age forty). Marriage for the elite male was a significant public step toward a career in the larger society. For the upper-class' woman, by contrast, the path leading to marriage steadily contracted her sphere of activities, confining her ever more strictly to the domestic realm. At the age of ten, just as her brothers were leaving the home to attend school, a young girl was cut off from all access to the world outside the home: she "ceased to go out from the women's apartments" and began instructions with a governess who taught her

pleasing speech and manners, to be docile and obedient, to handle the hempen fibres, to deal with the cocoons, to weave silks and shape waistbands, to learn

woman's work in order to supply necessary clothing; to be present at the sacrifices, supplying the liquors and sauces, filling the various stands and dishes with pickles and brine, and assisting in setting out the appurtenances for the ceremonies. (Based on Legge 1967 1:479; LC 12:15b)

For the young lady, the counterpart of her brother's capping ceremony was the hair-pinning ritual, which took place at the age of fifteen, to be followed by marriage at the age of twenty to twenty-three years (Legge 1967 1:479; LC 12:16a). At that point, a portentous choice was made: she became a bride if she went through the rites of betrothal, a concubine if she did not (ibid.). Following the elaborate rituals signifying her transfer into the household of another family, the young woman centered her activities in the home of her husband's parents, concentrating her energies on the needs of that household.

We are accustomed to viewing this transition in a young woman's life as the nadir of her life cycle, the point at which she became least powerful, most vulnerable, most isolated, most alienated (Wolf 1972:128-41). Like all aspects of Confucian thought, however, norms governing marriage embodied what Benjamin Schwartz (1959) has called "polarities," and mid-Ch'ing writers were looking to dignify, not degrade, their women. They therefore focused on passages that both sanctioned wifely obedience and subservience and also stressed the dignity and authority of the wife in her new husband's family. A close reading of the Han ritual texts revealed that from the time of her entry into the home of her husband, the bride was ritually marked as his mother's successor. The Po-hu t'ung made this clear in a poignant passage: "The wedding is not [a case] for congratulations; it is [a case of] generations succeeding each other" (Tjan 1952 1:249; PHT 4 shang :255-56). In the Po-hu t'ung, as the groom goes out to meet the bride, his father reflects that the son is soon to replace him at the ancestral sacrifices: "Go and meet thy helpmeet, that [with her] thou mayst succeed me in the sacrifices to the ancestral temple. With diligence lead her, [but also] with respect, [for she is] the successor of thy mother after her death"(ibid.).^[6]

Thus, although it is true that a young bride's sphere of activity remained confined to the "inner" domestic realm after her marriage, certain ritual texts nevertheless emphasize the power she acquired, barring misfortune, in her new sphere. It was these texts that caught the eye of status-conscious bride-givers in the mid-Ch'ing era, particularly the chapter on marriage in the Li chi.

The Li chi stresses wifely deference and submission, re. marking frequently on the importance of "obedience," "duty," and "service." At the same time, it offers a view of the marital relationship that emphasizes affection, partnership, and shared responsibility. Affirming the overwhelming importance

of finding a suitable wife, the Li chi elaborates on the wife's central role in her marital family. Noting that "the ceremony of marriage provides for the propitious union between two [families of different] surnames" (LC 44:1a), the text explains that the purposes of the bond were, first, to ensure the continuation of sacrifices in the ancestral temple, and, second, to secure the continuity of the family line. The Li chi emphasizes the seriousness and profundity of the rituals surrounding the exchange of information and gifts leading up to the engagement and the ceremonies marking the wedding itself. Part of the ceremony included the ritual eating of the same animal and sipping from cups made from halves of the same melon; this showed, according to the text, "that they now formed one body, were of equal rank, and pledged to mutual affection" (Legge 1967 2:429-30; LC 44:1b).

On careful reading, then, the Li chi could be interpreted to emphasize distinctions and difference more than hierarchy, dominance, or submission. A proper marriage was arranged and celebrated to underscore gender differences and to emphasize the complementary and separate responsibilities of man and woman in the conjugal relationship. Marriage was the primary human social bond demonstrating the "righteousness," or "propriety" (i ), of each distinctive human role. Like all primary relationships, marriage required deference and submission (wives are to husbands as sons are to fathers and subjects to rulers). But the Li chi stressed that husband and wife interact to demonstrate harmony, and it implied that a filial son would learn how to establish a warm and responsible relationship with his father, not by observing his mother's deference, but by watching his parents' loving interaction. A father who abused his wife would invite only his son's resentment and rejection, and a resentful and rebellious son, as everyone knows, makes an unreliable subject. Thus the Li chi revealed how a wife mediates the critical filial bond tying father to son. She was the pivot around which loyal and compliant subjects were socialized (LC 44:1b).

The complementary responsibilities of husband and wife were also summarized in a concluding passage of the "Hun i" ("The Meaning of Marriage") chapter, which explains how, in ancient times, the Son of Heaven took charge of instructions pertaining to the "public and external government of the kingdom," while his wife instructed the palace women "in the domestic and private rule which should prevail throughout the kingdom" (Legge 1967 2:432-33; LC 44:3a). Thus, the regulation and harmony of families was the responsibility of women, just as the regulation and harmony of government was that of men.

The natural basis of this gender division of labor in the governance of public and private spheres was proved by its correlations with the natural world: when the public sphere was in disorder, an eclipse of the sun occurred; when the private realm. was in disarray, the moon was eclipsed. The

Son of Heaven, or the queen, as appropriate, had to respond to these portents with purification rituals. Parents of the people, the emperor and empress, were like father and mother, each attending to his or her appropriate concerns (LC 44:3b).

In general, the language of classical texts masked hierarchy in this way, stressing not subordination but complementary spheres and "natural" sequential transformations. A discussion of the relationships among the five elements in the Po-hu t'ung, for example, offered a cosmological explanation for patrilocal marriage. Referring to the relationships among the five ebb-merits, the text says: "The son not leaving his parents models himself on what? He models himself on fire which does not depart from wood. The daughter leaving her parents models herself on what? She models herself on water which by flowing departs from metal" (Tjan 1952 2:442; PHT 2 shang :95). The principle of complementarity between husband and wife was apparent in other sections of the classics. Both the Li chi and the I li describe a particular ritual to he performed on the day after the wedding, dramatizing the importance of the entering bride. The ceremony required the parents of the groom first to toast the new bride. She then toasted them in turn, after which the parents were to leave the room by a door facing west, while the bride departed from the east. Commentators explain that these directions signify that the bride will ultimately take her mother-in-law's place in the family, becoming the woman responsible for carrying on the family line.^[7] As a ritual statement, this ceremony followed by one day the rites in which the new bride served her parents-in-law a dressed pig, signifying her obedience.

For the bride, then, rituals expressing obedience were coupled with those emphasizing responsibility and authority. Obedience was critical not only because it upheld the authority of elders but also because it was essential to the harmony of the household; one day the bride herself would have to command obedience from younger women. The text repeatedly notes that the perpetuation of the family line depends on domestic harmony, for which the women who presided over the household were responsible. It is worth noting here that all power consigned to wives in the domestic realm was constrained on every side by fine distinctions of age and status. Teaching women how to use this power became an obsession of mid-Ch'ing scholars, who were drawn to these ritual texts, as we shall see, for reasons of their own.

Constrained or no, the idea of complementarity between spouses so evident in Han texts formed an important theme in mid-Ch'ing scholarly writing on women and the family. It appears prominently in the writings of Yü Cheng-hsieh (1775-1840), well known as a critic of foot binding, widow chastity, and the double standard (Ropp 1981:144-46).^[8] A skilled philologist, Yü researched the history of language, which clearly influenced his views on women. In a short note on the historical meaning of the word ch'i (wife), Yü examined in some detail the "egalitarian" interpretation of marriage in

Han texts, explaining why the classics could not be invoked to support the subordination of women in marriage and the family (KSTK 4:105-6):

The Discourses in the White Tiger Hall [PHT 4 shang :268] states that ch'i ('wife') means ch'i ('equal'), that is to say, she is equal to her husband. The "Chiao t'e sheng" chapter of the Book of Rites says: "Your husband is the person with whom you stand as an equal [ch'i ] on the platform [of marriage]; you are never to leave him as long as you live." It is from this phrase that the word [wife] derived its meaning.

Now the term fu ('husband') means fu ('to support, to steady, to prop up'). This term originally was a yang [masculine, strong, active] word. The word ch'i ('wife') derived from the word ch'i ('to perch, to settle, to rest for the night'), which is most assuredly a yin [feminine, weak, passive] term.

The "Hun i" chapter of the Book of Rites says: "In ancient times, the emperor had one empress (hou ), three consorts (fu-jen ), nine concubines (p'in ), twenty-seven mistresses (shih-fu ), and eighty-one paramours (yü-ch'i )." The "Ch'ü li" chapter says: "The emperor has an empress (hou ), consorts (fu-jen ), concubines (p'in ), mistresses (shih-fu ), paramours (ch'i ), and lovers (ch'ieh )."^[9] It also states that the feudal lords have consorts (fu-jen ), mistresses (shih-fu ), paramours (ch'i ), and lovers (ch'ieh ). In this case, clearly, the term ch'i does not mean "equal."

Confucians have a saying that an imperial paramour (ch'i ) is the same as an imperial lover (ch'ieh ), which they explain is because the term ch'i means "equal." And what are we to make of the "Ch'ü li" passage that mentions paramours and lovers in the same breath?

The term ch'i must be understood in its specific context. It is used by everyone from the emperor to the common people.

In textual research, notes such as these offered no larger analytical or moral message. They nonetheless show us how scholars of the mid-Ch'ing era attempted to recover the consciousness and the values of the past and gave them new life in their writing and thought.

Understanding language in historical context made it possible, for instance, to distinguish the past practices of the imperial household and the ancient aristocracy from the standards that guided the scholar class in the present. Yü's short research note titled "Appellations" ("Ch'eng-ming") (KSTK 4:125) analyzed the classical terms used for affines, notably ego's wife's brothers and ego's sisters' spouses and their sons. The note specifically compared past practice with present custom, indicating that regular social intercourse between intermarrying families, including the brothers of wives and the spouses of sisters, was an important feature of mid-Ch'ing family life. We shall refer again to Yü Cheng-hsieh's textual research and to the complementarity of conjugal bonds when we examine the common interests of intermarrying families in the eighteenth century.

Probably the aspect of Yü Cheng-hsieh's thought that has received the most attention (where it pertains to the status of women) is his critique of the

double standard implicit in the ban on widow remarriage—a prohibition that was widely observed among the upper classes of the Ch'ing period (Elvin 1984; Mann 1987). Yü's point of departure for his argument, in the essay "On Chaste Widows" ("Chieh-fu shuo"), was his research on the notion of ch'i (equality, matching) between husband and wife at marriage. He quotes from the "Chiao t'e sheng" chapter in the Li chi: "A match once made should never be broken" (LC 11:13b). This means, he says, that when one's spouse dies, one does not remarry. He concedes that Pan Chao in the Han, so widely cited as the model for young widows of later times, did in fact write that "a husband has a duty (i ) to remarry; for a wife, there is no written prescription for entering a second marital relationship. Therefore, for a woman, her husband is like Heaven [and she can never replace him with someone else]." But confronting this passage, Yü comments:

Although it is absolutely true that no written permission is given for women to remarry, there is at the same time an unwritten assumption that men should not take a second wife. The reason why the sages did not make this standard of conduct explicit in their teachings is the same as the reasoning that underlies the following passage: "The rites do not descend to the common people, nor do punishments reach up to gentlemen." When we make this statement, of course, we do not mean that commoners cannot follow the rites, or that gentlemen will never be punished. By the same token, men who wantonly seek wives just because the meaning of the Book of Rites was not explicitly spelled out are ignoring their true duty. According to the ancient rites, husband and wife were to be honored or despised together, as a single body. But a man sets his wife apart in a lower position when he invokes the ancient phrase "never be broken." He should realize that the "never" refers to both men and women alike. "Casting out a wife for the seven reasons" in fact describes seven ways to break a match; "if his wife dies, a man should remarry" is the eighth way. When the principles and duties of men are so broadly defined and unspecific, it is truly shameful to read so much into a few words and then use them to establish limits on wives alone. (KSLK 13:493)

Classical revival, then, in calling attention to the double standard, emphasized the privileged role of wives. The Po-hu t'ung took great pains to distinguish principal wives from concubines: "The rites forbid the betrothal of a woman as concubine. This means that she cannot be raised [to the position of principal wife]" (Tjan 1949 1:258; PHT 4 shang :264).^[10]

There were good practical, as well as moral, reasons why mid-Ch'ing writers were concerned about widower remarriage, and these shall be examined below. The point here, however, is to stress again the impact of classical revival on the views of mid-Ch'ing literati. At every turn, it appears, they were discovering ways to valorize the status of brides and wives in their class and to emphasize the differences that separated marriageable women from concubines and women of lower rank.

Female Literacy and Women's Education

The Han Learning movement coincided with a proliferation of guidebooks for educated women, including reprints of the Instructions for Women (Nü chieh ) by Pan Chao, the illustrious female scholar (nü-shih ) of the Han period. (Yü Cheng-hsieh's essay criticizing widow chastity begins by quoting from this important text, underscoring its high visibility in the mid-Ch'ing period.) Interest in women's education followed naturally from classical injunctions requiring special preparation and training for aristocratic young ladies, preferably in the ancestral hall of their descent groups. Women were educated for marriage, and the best education for marriage was training in the Four Attributes (ssu te ) appropriate to wives: proper virtue, speech, carriage, and work (Legge 1967 2:431-32; LC 44:2b).

The connection between moral education and marriage was made explicit by Pan Chao, who used the idea of the Four Attributes to organize her own instruction book. Her text, a training book for wifehood, invoked concepts of complementarity in marriage found in the Li chi. She understood the tao of conjugal relationships to be metaphorically like the "natural" relationships of yin and yang, Earth and Heaven. She valorized marriage by calling attention to the honor accorded it in the Li chi and by emphasizing that it is celebrated by the first ode in the Shih ching. She also criticized views of marriage that stressed only the control of husbands over their wives, noting that though all classical texts portrayed marriage as a reciprocal relationship that depended on the wife's ability to "serve" her husband as well as on his ability to "control" her, both service and control depended on the "worthiness" (hsien ) of each partner. Men, she noted, were educated so that they could understand the foundations of their authority and wield it effectively; women too required education if they were to serve properly in the domestic realm:

Only to teach men and not to teach women—is that not ignoring the essential relation between them? According to the "Rites," it is the rule to begin to teach children to read at the age of eight years, and by the age of fifteen years they ought then to be ready for cultural training. Only why should it not be (that girls' education as well as boys' be) according to this principle? (Swarm 1932:84-85; NC shang :4b-5a)

These views on women's education, and Pan Chao's own eminence as a scholar and intellectual, were taken seriously by scholars of Han Learning during the eighteenth century. Until that time, from the Six Dynasties period through most of the Ming, Pan Chao was probably best remembered as a celibate widow (Swann 1932:51). In the late Ming period, however, interest in female instruction took a new turn. Lü K'un anticipated the concerns of some mid-Ch'ing intellectuals: he was interested in the complementarity of the husband-wife relationship and concerned about educating women as fu-

ture mothers and heads of the domestic realm (Handlin 1975:36-38). Handlin, in her analysis of Lü K'un's own instruction book for women, the Kuei fan (Regulations for the Women's Quarters), emphasizes that he was addressing a "new audience" of commoners (min-chien fu-nü ) who "suddenly have three or five volumes in their chests" (ibid., 17).

During the eighteenth century, accessible schooling and rising standards of living expanded the market for books. Commoners attuned to concerns about proper marriage and behavior were avid consumers of works on managing the household. Women were part of this consumer market: literate women were prominent in Buddhist sutra-reading societies and in poetry classes, studying with Yuan Mei and other leading scholars (Ch'en 1928: 257-74).^[11]

Concern about female education was mounting, as evidenced by the market for women's instruction books.^[12] A compact new edition of basic books, self-consciously styled The Four Books for Women (Nü ssu-shu ), was bound and printed before the middle of the nineteenth century under the editorship of Wang Hsiang, who contributed one of the four works—a collection of his own mother's instructions, the Nü-fan chieh-lu (A Brief Outline of Rules for Women).^[13] The other three books were Pan Chao's Nü chieh; a T'ang text entitled Nü Lun-yü (Analects for Women), written by Sung Jo-hua; and the Nei hsun (Instructions for the Inner Apartments), composed early in the fifteenth century by the empress Hsu (Jen Hsiao-wen).

Education for women was the subject of a much-reprinted collection of moral instructions by Ch'en Hung-mou. In the preface to his Repository of Rules for Education of Women (Chiao-nü i-kuei ), Ch'en explained the significance of female education:

The girl who begins as a daughter in your family marries out and becomes a wife; she bears a child and becomes a mother. A wise daughter (hsien nü ) will make a wise wife and mother. And wise mothers rear wise sons and grandsons. The process of kingly transformation [literally, wang-hua, the transformative influence of the ruler on his subjects] therefore begins in the women's apartments, and a family's future advantage is tied to the purity and the education of its women. Hence education is of the utmost importance. (CNIK Preface: 2a)

Clearly, education was for Ch'en the mark that set apart the women of his class—those given and those taken as brides—from everyone else. But what sort of education should women receive? In Ch'ing times, upper-class women were trained in the arts of needlework, poetry, painting, calligraphy, and music-making.^[14] Mastery of these arts alone, however, did not mark status, for they were also claimed by professional female entertainers and courtesans. What set apart the marriageable women of Ch'en's class from the rest was moral instruction: education in the ta i, or "ultimate significance," of classical texts.

In an essay addressing this subject—significantly, the first of his works to command widespread attention—Chang Hsueh-ch'eng sketched the history of "women's learning," or "women's studies," since ancient times. The earliest women's studies, he argued, were in fact professional curricula that trained women for specific occupations. Thus, female historians studied one body of texts, female soothsayers another, female shamans still another—just as men would select one of the arts for specialized training for a particular office. Later, however, more general studies for women as a gender category developed, and a body of learning proper to females (as opposed to males) emerged. This "women's studies" literature emphasized womanly virtue, speech, appearance, and conduct and linked these to the example and scholarship of Pan Chao.^[15]

In Chang's mind, moral education of the sort espoused by Pan Chao contrasted explicitly with training in the arts for professional female entertainers. Chang praised the Manchu government for taking a strong stand on this issue by banning female courtesans from the palace Office of Musicians (Chiao fang ssu) and distancing itself from the patronage and training of female entertainers. To teach women music and poetry without requiring prior rigorous training in the rites—especially the rites of family relation-ships—was to invite loose morals.

The removal of courtesans from the Office of Musicians, which Chang called "the most illustrious act of our august ruling dynasty" to date, loomed large in the minds of mid-Ch'ing intellectuals for another reason: it was the prelude to the general emancipation of debased peoples. The Office of Musicians was originally staffed by a hereditary class of professional entertainers called "music makers" (yueh-hu ), some of whose descendants were already living in isolated communities in north China after being expelled from the palace in a political dispute early in the fifteenth century. The yueh-hu were the first of the major pariah groups named in the emancipation edicts, and scholars specifically linked the abolition of the hereditary court musicians' offices to the end of pariah status for the yueh-hu. Writing more than fifty years later, Yü Cheng-hsieh took the history of the Office of Musicians as his own point of departure for a long essay on the emancipation proclamations (KSLK 12:474-87).^[16]

The end of debased-status groups, especially hereditary groups of female entertainers, threatened the integrity of endogamous marriage markets, and with it the very foundation of hierarchy among women.^[17] As bearers of the honor and status of their class, marriageable female commoners had to be kept separate from those who were bought and sold.^[18] Thus, debates about women's education simultaneously explicated and clarified anew the critical class barriers in this mobile society. One result was the essay by Chang Hsueh-ch'eng that attempted to draw more firmly the lines around the cloistered women's domain by scorning the attempts of some women to join male-

dominated poetry arid writing groups. The ending of legal restrictions on debased groups must be seen in the context of a more commercialized society in which status barriers of all kinds were becoming less salient.

Rules for Family Living: Women in the Domestic Group

To serve the new market, in addition to books on women's instruction, guides to family living that addressed wifely roles were printed in affordable new editions or privately circulated among friends. The classic family instruction books composed by Yen Chih-t'ui in the Six Dynasties period (Yen-shih chia-hsun ) and by Yuan Ts'ai in the Sung (Yuan-shih shih-fan ) were rescued from the rare book market and reprinted in the Compendium from the Never-Enough-Knowledge Studio (Chih-pu-tsu-chai ts'ung-shu), bringing their cost within the means of most scholarly families.^[19] Reading and rereading these old texts, a few scholars were inspired to compile their own books for the education of their offspring and family members. (We shall examine one such contribution, by Wang Hui-tsu, below.) Interest in advice books went hand in hand with another new fashion: publishing "clan rules" to accompany the genealogies that were at the peak of their popularity during this period (Hui-chen Wang Liu 1959a:71).

Even the so-called statecraft writers of the mid-Ch'ing era tried their hand at essays on family matters. Wei Yuan's classic Collected Writings on Statecraft of Our August Dynasty (Huang-ch'ao ching-shih wen-pien), compiled in 1824-25, devoted an entire chapter (chüan 60) to essays on family instructions (chia chiao ), including the excerpt from Chang Hsueh-ch'eng's "Women's Studies" (Fu hsueh) discussed above.^[20] Essays in the section on ritual examine the position of women in the patrilineal family system, especially the problematic ritual place of concubines and successor wives.^[21] Domestic relations, particularly the conjugal bond, were not irrelevant to statecraft, if we may judge by Wei Yuan's selections.^[22] Finally, the chapter on marriage rites in Wei Yuan's collection begins with an essay on women's education: it was "the foundation of a proper family, the beginning of kingly transformation" (HCCSWP 61:1-2).

Wang Hui-tsu (173l-1807), himself a writer of the statecraft school who published a famous guidebook for administrative aides, wrote his own guide for the domestic realm: a set of family instructions dedicated to his children and titled Simple Precepts from the Hall Enshrining a Pair of Chaste Widows (Shuang-chieh-t'ang yung-hsun). (The title commemorates the two women who were most responsible for shaping his views on such matters: his late father's second wife and his own mother, who was a concubine.)^[23] The work is addressed to his sons and grandsons:

Once while I was home nursing an illness, I began reading the Yen-shih chia-hsun and the Yuan-shih shih-fan every day, and I would expound on these texts to

my assembled family, to provide them with models for "maintaining their integrity while remaining involved with worldly affairs" [ch'ih-shen she-shih ]. Sometimes I would expound upon the general principles; at other times I would give concrete examples as illustrations. Felicitous words, elegant deeds, and the foundations of day-to-day relationships between teachers and pupils—on each of these subjects, from time to time, I was pleased to offer formal teachings in the Way of proper conduct, which they in turn were to record by hand. Gradually my notes filled a satchel with jottings. I organized the notes that amplified the sentiments in the Yen and Yuan texts into six broad categories, encompassing 219 small items. These I arranged in six chapters.

The first is called "A Record of Those Who Went Before." It commemorates the wisdom of our ancestors, beginning with the events in the life of my late mother and her actual deeds, without repeating anything that has already been written down. The next chapter is called "Regulating the Self." This means, as Confucius once said, being able to follow your natural desires without transgressing what is right. The third chapter is called "Managing the Family." This chapter is limited to the discussion of a fundamental principle: continuing the ancestral line requires the guidance of mothers. Therefore the chapter deals in some detail with women's behavior. The fourth chapter, entitled "Responding to the Times," shows how if one has few occasions for blame, and few for regret, one will be able to rejoice many times over. The fifth chapter is called "Plan for the Future." It shows how to provide security for future generations, and how to sow the seeds of great things to come. The final chapter is entitled "Teachers and Friends," and includes a discussion of relationships in school. (SCTYH Preface:1a-b)

Picking up a theme from both the Yen-shih chia-hsun and the Yuan-shih shih-fan, Wang Hui-tsu examined the intricacies of remarriage and widowhood in a large Chinese family.^[24] He lavished special attention on the plight of the widower who must find another mother for his children, a situation well understood in his own household, as his father took a second wife after the first died, though his own mother, a concubine, was still living. What kinds of problems confronted the widower? How irreplaceable was his first wife? And what pitfalls awaited the man who took a second wife instead of contenting himself with a concubine lacking the ritually high status accorded a spouse?

The first answer to these questions appears in a section entitled "Taking a second wife makes it hard to be a father":

Your first wife may not necessarily be wise, but the children she bears will not resent her on that account. In the unlucky event that she dies, however, you may have no choice but to take a successor wife. And if she happens to be unwise, and insists on making narrow distinctions [presumably between her children and others, or between her conjugal interests and those of the larger household], patching up the quarrels that result will be a source of grief for you.

If conditions are optimal and your new wife understands the larger moral principles of family relationships, she will always be unfailingly kind. But even in

those circumstances the children of your first wife will look on her as an outsider. And so if you give them instructions or assign them tasks, they will blame all their failure to carry out your orders on their stepmother.

For you, the father, this means that reproof and admonitions to your children will always provoke resentment and jealousy from them; even if you do nothing, you will invite slander from them. Who can be blamed for this situation? (SCTYH 3:2a)

Clearly, the person to blame is the father, for making the mistake of re-marrying. Elevating a second woman to the formal status of mother to all one's children is a step to be taken only at the risk of alienating offspring and losing one's authority over the coming generation.

Wang Hui-tsu commented further on the relationship between stepmothers and their stepchildren in a note entitled "Serving a stepmother":

Even if a stepmother is hard to please, she must be attended to according to the rules of propriety. How much more true this is if your stepmother is easy to please! Even so, we often find that a mother who is easy to please gets a reputation for being hard to please, even to the point where she is being called "narrow-hearted" (pu-i ) and the father is being called "unkind." Now what kind of an attitude is that?

There are exceptions to this pattern. For instance, no one could have been wiser than my [step]mother Lady Wang. Thus, when I was thirteen years of age, she restrained me with orders that were strict and spartan. An agnatic kinsman of my father's generation said to me privately: "Your mother treats your younger sister far more kindly than she treats you." I denied this passionately, and thereafter I listened to her instructions more diligently than ever. Within four years, my kinsman's son was dead, and a little over ten years later, he himself died. Now his descendants are also dead, and this causes me to wonder whether his words may not still be having an effect today. (SCTYH 3:2a-b)

A stepmother, we see here, easily became the object of gossip and slander among kinsmen. Her commitment to her stepchildren was ambivalent, and that ambivalence could readily be turned against her by gossip that alienated her spouse's offspring. Few stepsons, we may imagine, were as loyal to their stepmothers as the young Wang Hui-tsu.^[25]

If the hapless widower chose not to remarry to avoid these problems, he only faced new ones. The plight of one unfortunate soul, in a large household full of conjugal units devoted to serving their own needs, is outlined in a section titled "In serving a widowed father or mother, one must be even more attentive than ever":

A widowed mother has her sons' wives to rely on and daughters to wait on her—although the sons' wives will have their own children, and the daughters their husbands arid in-laws as well, so a widow cannot depend exclusively on

her own children; if she is ill, or in pain, or hungry, or thirsty, she may have no one to complain to.

But how truly desolate is the father who is old and living alone! Recently I visited an elderly kinsman who had lost his wife in middle age, and who had been sleeping and eating alone well past his eightieth year. He said to me: "My handkerchief has been ruined for a long time, and I've been trying to get another one, but I can't." And so saying, he began to weep. I was greatly distressed by this, and I went to report it to his sons. They paid no attention. Not long after, his sons too went the same route, poorer than he. The mirror of Heaven is close at hand—isn't it fearsome! (SCTYH 3:2b-3a)

Each of Wang's homilies makes clear the intractable complications stemming from the death of a first wife in households that observed Confucian family norms. The father who remarried to ensure care and companionship in his old age risked rebellion or alienation from his children; fathers shielded their children from the wiles of a stepmother at the price of a solitary and lonely retirement. Clearly, however, in mid-Ch'ing times this was the price they were expected to pay.

Further discussion of the problems involving first and successor wives, from a slightly different perspective, appeared in Ch'en Hung-mou's Repository. Though the classics taught women that "one's husband is one's Heaven," in reality a wife had to serve three heavens: her father-in-law, her mother-in-law, and her spouse (CNIK hsia :22b). Her primary duty there was to encourage him to be completely filial to his parents: "the full realization of filiality begins with the wife." But remarriage complicated the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. For example, remarriage posed the possibility that a daughter-in-law might "distinguish between the first and the second." A "successor wife," that is, a woman who took the ritual place of a deceased first wife, might not command the respect of her status-conscious daughter-in-law. On this account, successor wives were warned to take care to be "polite" to their stepsons' wives, and daughters-in-law were enjoined never to make any distinction between the "first" and the "second" by such nasty little signs as passing through doorways first. Families were cautioned to watch for telltale signs of insubordination and correct the wayward daughter-in-law's thinking immediately (ibid., 24a).

These "petty distinctions" among women (widely decried as the source of all discord in Confucian families) could be drawn still more finely in cases where the daughter-in-law, as a ritually sanctioned first wife (shih-hsi ), served a mother-in-law who was herself a concubine (shu-ku ). In such cases, the advice to the daughter-in-law was clear: "You may not presume upon your status as first wife to slight a concubine" (pu-k'o shih shih man shu ) (CNIK hsia :24b).

Ch'en's Repository therefore recognized that status-conscious (i.e., well-

educated) brides could not he counted on to abandon their class consciousness within the confines of the domestic sphere. And if they were hard on mothers-in-law, they were even worse when it came to servants. Wives took out their frustration, their boredom, and their jealousies on their servants because propriety forbade striking relatives or even children. In fact, physical abuse of servants was so common among women of the upper classes that one text in the Repository supplies detailed descriptions of types of abuse as a warning to readers. Servants, by their conduct and appearance, offered a living testimony to the faults of an abusive mistress: "One may enter her home, observe her servants, anti know whether she is a good wife or not" (CNIK hsia :1a-5a.) The Repository admonished its female audience that servants were not "a different order of being, like dogs or horses," but human. It stressed that scholars and commoners could not own slaves, though slaves were still employed in government service. Instead, male servants in commoner households were called "adopted sons" (i-nan ) and female servants "adopted daughters" (i-hsi, or i-nü ), to signify that they were "just like family members." They were to be so treated: well clothed, well fed, never abused (ibid., 1a-5b).

If young women with servants could be abusive, they could also be lazy. Sloth was a blot on the character of any bride, an all-too-common sign that she had abandoned one of the four cardinal womanly attributes. Young ladies who grew up waited on hand and foot never learned how to manage properly their role as mistress of the family servants and keeper of the household account books. Unlike wives in poor families—"busy all day, reeling thread, cooking food, drawing water, pounding rice, minding the farm, serving their mothers-in-law, suckling babies, generally working to exhaustion" (CNIK hsia :14b)—the women who circulated through the marriage markets of the rich were spoiled, above all, by servants. Nursemaids took care of their children; maids and concubines even did their needlework! "All they have to think about is making themselves beautiful. Everything is done for them, so they don't know that rice comes from a stalk and silk is unreeled from cocoons. They treat money like dirt, and living creatures like bits of straw" (ibid., 15a).

Problems with household servants could be mitigated through fictive kin ties and prolonged association. But relations with women of low status outside the household were always dangerous. Every instruction book contained warnings about the "hags" whose marginal occupations gave them access to the cloistered inner apartments—female physicians, religious adepts, go-betweens, peddlers, nuns.^[26] Wives had to be taught to "maintain strictly the separation of the inner domain from the outside world," lest they become the victims of gossip and manipulation by threatening females from outside who would "turn their hearts astray" (CNIK chung :4a).

Repeated admonitions about the "six hags" reveal anxiety about female

mobility and about defining boundaries around women. Women's religious practice, and the corrupting influence of the religious—not only nuns but also monks and priests—worried Ch'en Hung-mou, who wrote about the need to cloister women in an essay reprinted in the Collected Writings on Statecraft (HCCSWP 68:5b):

A woman's proper ritual place is sequestered in the inner apartments. When at rest, she should lower the screen [in front of her]; when abroad, she must cover her face in order to remove herself from any suspicion or doubt, and prevent herself from coming under observation.^[27] But instead we find young women accustomed to wandering about, all made up, heads bare and faces exposed, and feeling no shame whatsoever! Some climb into their sedan chairs and go traveling in the mountains. . . . We even find them parading around visiting temples and monasteries, burning incense and holding services, kneeling to listen to the chanting of the sutras. In the temple courtyards and in the precincts of the monasteries, they chat and laugh freely. The worst times are in the last ten days of the third lunar month, when they form sisterhoods and spend the night in local temples; and on the sixth day of the sixth month, when they believe that if they turn over the pages of the sutras ten times, they will be transformed into men in the next life.

The text goes on to condemn the monks and priests who seduce these mobile women in much the same tone reserved for the nuns and other "hags" who serve as liaisons between cloistered females and the outside world.

Again, concerns about women traveling abroad to monasteries were not new in the eighteenth century. But in the larger context of a mobile society, where competition for status was being promoted on many levels by action of the state, an obsession with boundaries in the writings of mid-Ch'ing scholars assumes a heightened significance. Concern about boundary crossing in the domestic realm, I would suggest, was a metaphor for concern about boundaries in the society as a whole. Within the scholar class, female literacy was breaking down the walls that separated the sexes and kept women pure from the contaminating influences of the outside world. In the society at large, mobility was eroding occupational and class barriers that had once served to segregate marriage markets. Though women were the focus of much of the anxiety that attended these changes, in the discourse we have examined, women became a vehicle for expressing concerns about status shared by all men of the scholar class.

Conclusion

That wives and marriage were a focal point in a discourse about class and mobility is hardly surprising. As in Renaissance Venice, nineteenth-century France, and colonial Mexico, marriage in mid-Ch'ing China was a contract that aimed above all at reproducing class structures.^[28] State law, and the

system of moral beliefs we call Confucianism, sanctioned norms governing marriage, and thereby protected the existing class hierarchy. However, those sanctions cut two ways: they could protect class-endogamous marriage markets, or they could undermine them. The discourse on marriage that emerged during the mid-Ch'ing period points to the ways in which the boundaries around sacrosanct marriage markets were being challenged. As the state moved to loosen status distinctions, Confucian morality was invoked to shore them up. Writers of the period show us, in their extended conversations about women and class, how the combined effects of affluence, literacy, and mobility threatened to destroy the conventions that lent stability and order to social life. Their conversations also remind us that codes lodging the honor of class and family in pure women were not confined to the shores of the Mediterranean. During periods of rapid social change, in China as elsewhere, women were named the guardians of morality and stability, charged with protecting the sanctuary of the family.

At the same time, as we have seen, women themselves posed part of the challenge to social order. Their literacy, their religiosity, and their own strivings for comfort and security helped to provoke the mid-Ch'ing discourse on marriage. What we know now about this discourse is based on what men said and wrote. But the time will come when we will be able to see beyond men's interests and show how women construed their own roles in the dramatic changes of the mid-Ch'ing era.^[29]

Glossary

Chang Hsueh-ch'eng

Ch'en Hung-mou

ch'eng-ming

ch'i (equal)

ch'i (paramour)

ch'i (to perch)

ch'i (wife)

chia chiao

Chiao fang ssu

Chiao-nü i-kuei

"Chiao t'e sheng"

"Chieh-fu shuo"

ch'ieh (concubine)

ch'ieh (lover)

chien

Chih-pu-tsu-chai ts'ung-shu

ch'ih-shen she-shih

"Ch'ü li"

fu (husband)

fu (to support)

Fu hsueh

Fu hsueh san tse

fu-jen

hou

hsien

hsien nü

Hsu (Jen Hsiao-wen)

Huang-ch'ao ching-shih wen-pien

"Hun i"

i

i-fu

i-hsi

I li

i-nan

i-nü

Kuei fan

k'uei-ssu

Li chi

liang

lien-tseng

Lü K'un

min-chien fu-nü

Nei hsun

"Nei tse"

Nü chieh

Nü-fan chieh-lu

Nü lun-yü

nü-shih

Nü ssu-shu

Pan Chao

p'in tse wei ch'i

p'in (betrothal gifts)

p'in (concubine)

Po-hu t'ung

pu-i

pu-k'o shih shih man shu

Shih ching

shih-fu

Shih hou-mu

shih-hsi

shu-ku

Shuang-chieh-t'ang yung-hsun

ssu te

Sung Juo-hua

ta i

tao

tso-hui

Wang Hsiang

wang hua

Wang Hui-tsu

WeiYuan

yang

Yen Chih-t'ui

Yen-shih chia-hsun

yin

Yü Cheng-hsieh

yü-ch'i

Yuan-shih shih-fan

Yuan Ts'ai

yueh-hu

yung-mien

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