Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China.

• Author: GEANEY, JANE M.
• Position: Review

Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China. By LISA RAPHALS. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1998. Pp. 348 + illus., tables. $21.95 (paper).

Lisa Raphals' Sharing the Light is a useful collection of the latest available information regarding the role of women in early Chinese history. In contrast to conventional interpretations, Raphals aims to demonstrate that in early China women were not as socially constrained as later periods portrayed them. The focus and the main virtue of her work lies in collating and interpreting a significant amount of information on this topic.

The book consists of two parts--one dedicated to Chinese stories in which women act as moral and intellectual agents, and the other focused on the evolution of Chinese concepts of the distinction between men and women. A series of detailed appendices helps corroborate Raphals' conclusions.

In part 1 (chapters 1-5), Raphals cites and describes multiple variants of early Chinese tales in which women play both positive and negative moral and intellectual roles. While sometimes tedious in their detail, these retellings, based mostly on the Lien[ddot{u}] zhuan in comparison with other texts, serve several functions. Raphals uses them to highlight slight changes in nuance in representations of gender in the sources. These changes support her position that in traditional China women were not universally oppressed. She concludes from these stories that early Chinese representations of women's moral skills and sageliness differed little from those of men. Raphals also intends the stories to "provide a counterpoint to the representations of Western feminism" (p. 7), although she only elaborates briefly on this theme in the conclusion.

Also in part 1, Raphals comments on the significance of the history of the Lien[ddot{u}] zhuan. She determines that many of the Lien[ddot{u}] zhuan stories correspond to Warring States depictions of women as political, ethical, and intellectual agents. Hence, she argues that the text may be accurately ascribed to Liu Xiang (c. 79-8 B.C.E.) and that it can be taken to represent how pre-Han sources portray women. Finally, in the last chapter of part 1, Raphals shows how Ming editions "contributed to the demise of the intellectual virtue narratives" (p. 9) by changing the organization and content of the Lien[ddot{u}] zhuan. That is, she maintains that by altering the...