Looking beyond the familiar trappings of the cult of female chastity—such as hagiographies of widows and chastity shrines–in late imperial China, this book explores the cult’s political significance and practical ramifications in everyday life during the eighteenth century. In the first full-length study of the subject, Janet Theiss examines a vast number of laws, legal cases, regulations, and policies to illustrate the social and political processes through which female virtue was defined, enforced, and contested. Along the way, she provides rich details of social life and cultural practices among ordinary Chinese people through narratives of criminal cases of sexual assault, harassment, adultery, and domestic violence.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
A Note on Textual Conventions
A Note on Dynasties and Reigns
Introduction
part one · The Chastening State: The Qing Chastity
Cult in Ritual, Law, and Statecraft
Prologue: A Chaste Barbarian Martyrs Herself on the Imperial Frontier
1. Defining Gender Orthodoxy for a Multiethnic Empire
2. Statecraft and Gender Order in the Qianlong Reign
part two · Female Virtue and the Politics of Patriarchy
Prologue: A Righteous Husband Plays the Politics of the Wifely Way
3. Enforcing Gender Order: Between the Ancestral Hall and the Yamen
4. Divided Loyalties: Natal Families and the Exercise of Patrilineal Authority
5. Adultery, Incest and the Multiple Meanings of Patriarchy
part three · Mapping Chastity across Boundaries of Body, Mind, and Space
Prologue: A Compromised Widow Sacrifices Her Body to Defend Inner Virtue
6. The Wages of Wanton Mixing: Violation and Gender Disorder
7. ‘Accommodating Sages’: Gender Separation in Social Practice
part four · ‘Being a Person’: Female Humiliation and Social Power
Prologue: Male Impropriety and Female Outrage Lead to a Tragic End
8. The Problem of Female Moral Agency
9. The Logic of Female Suicide
Epilogue
A Note on Archival Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Character List
Index
About the author
Janet M. Theiss is Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah.
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