Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century.

• Author: Wu, Yenna
• Position: Review

By SUSAN MANN. Stanford: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1997. Pp. 326 + tables, maps, illustrations. $49.50 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

In Precious Records, Susan Mann places women at the center of High Qing (c. 1683-1839) history in order to correct the dominant misconception of the oppression of women in Chinese culture and to demonstrate the necessity of including women and issues of gender in writing history. She focuses on "learned women" (guixiu) in the Lower Yangzi region, showing how they became empowered from their writing, work, and roles as moral wife and mother, and obtained moral authority at home and in the empire. Mann sets up an important model for future scholars of Chinese history and culture: she reconstructs social history by retrieving lesser-known source materials written by women, while adopting new ways to read more familiar sources written by men about women. Rather than offering a simplistic answer, she examines the complex issues in their various aspects. She also carefully distinguishes the perceptions and rhetoric of elite writers from the voices of learned women, and from our modern views. She thus greatly broadens our general understanding of Chinese women's history, bringing new insights into "China's long eighteenth century," in particular.

In her introduction Mann contextualizes her topic in Chinese and Western historiography. She argues that in terms of "women's learning in social and cultural life," the High Qing differs from the late Ming and is by no means an era of women's "lack of education" and oppression, as late-nineteenth-century Chinese reformers and foreign missionaries typically saw it (pp. 7-8). She cautions about applying paradigms from Western historiography to Chinese history, pointing out differences between gender relations in China and those of the West. An important difference is that, unlike learned women in the West, learned women in High-Qing China had little freedom to remain unmarried and no access to academies, yet they could expect to have their writings published (pp. 9-10). In addition, Chinese women played supremely important roles as wives and mothers inside the home, embodying "the moral autonomy and authority on which husbands and sons must rely to succeed outside" (p. 15).

Mann relies much upon women's writings, especially poetry, to "correct the distortions inherent in the male gaze and to see how women themselves articulate value and meaning" (p. 4). But in order to see women's roles and relations in a more comprehensive context, she also...