The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China

by Joan Judge

This book reveals and interprets the rich diversity of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Chinese approaches to their own past and the modern West through the lens of the woman question. Writers and activists who engaged in debates over this question variously appropriated biographies of women―a genre with a 2,000-year history in China and a new political salience in the early twentieth century. Judge maps the ways these individuals used historical Chinese and modern Western women's biographies to promote competing visions of female virtue, talent, and heroism, and, ultimately, to advance competing evaluations of China's ritual teachings, cultural heritage, and national future. She concludes by applying the hermeneutics of historical change she develops for the turn of the twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first century, as women's issues continue to foreground Chinese conceptions of the past, the West, and the nation.

Genres: China

416 pages, Hardcover

First published February 20, 2008

About the author

Joan Judge is a professor of history and humanities at York University and a cultural historian of modern China with a scholarly focus on print culture and women’s history at the turn of the twentieth century.

Reviews

[Brian Griffith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Judge explores how Chinese women's stories were used, or revised in the photo-shops of people's minds, so that the same legends could serve utterly different visions. She focuses on the "woman question" debate at the turn of the twentieth century, when the heritage and future of women's culture seemed totally up for grabs. The legends of filial daughters, martyrs for chastity, mothers of the nation, heroes of the people, are proclaimed, reviled, or transformed to serve new dreams. Women take charge of the editing, not just of the oral folklore, but of the written record.

This book's selection of writings stresses women's suffering, and women's answers to it. It shows women reacting to Confucian orthodoxy in a debate over social role models. There is some talk of recovering women's own traditions. But we don't hear of China's great female religious leaders, like Sun Buer, Chen Jinggu, Miaoshan, Wei Huacun, Cao Wenyi, or their versions of religion made by women, for women. We hear little or nothing of popular goddesses such as like Guanyin (Kwan Yin) or Mazu. Judge records a great many women's protests against a male-controlled establishment, but gives only an indirect taste of the women's alternative worlds.