影响中国历史的100个女人

by 墨香满楼

传统的历史给了男人更多的关照，却少了对女人的关注和荣耀，她们是中国历史绕不开的死结。本书从另一个视角展示了这些女性的美丽、欲望、才情和智慧等，并作了客观的评价。本中所呈现的100个女人，100个丽影， 100种风采，她们离奇跌宕的身世和不可复制的命运，无不是一个时代与历史的精彩缩影。徜徉于她们之间，可以通晓历史、品味女人、感悟女人，从一个全新的视角去审视人类的另一半，从而得以全面地审视整个世界、整个人类！

330 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2013

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hoo boy do I have a lot to say about this one. It took me 6 months to struggle through it, and even though I'm only giving it 2 stars, it was worth it for the improvement in my language reading skills. My biggest issue with this book is that it judges the women it discusses without judging their historical context. So for example, it criticizes "palace women" for being cruel, jealous, and manipulative, but never criticizes the system whereby these women became concubines at the ages of 13 or 14. Of course a child who is married off to a man and raped is going to have severe emotional problems! Not only does it not criticize this system, it feeds into it by calling these women beautiful and gorgeous when they were children. It encourages the reader to look at children as attractive, instead of putting the reader at a distance by saying something like, even though she was a child, by the standards of the time she was considered attractive, etc. Just generally the author makes sweeping misogynistic generalizations- here are just a couple-
“能让一个女人做出揭竿起义这种事，完全是由于天性--母爱使然。” So if women have the urge to rise up against oppression, it all comes from their "motherly instinct'?
“女人啊女人，你为何一碰到权力，即变得如此可怕，如此不堪，六亲不认，心狠手辣？” This just says that when women even have the slightest touch of power, they become horrible monsters. Like men have done such a good job being kind and powerful rulers???
A whole section (out of six total) is dedicated to "beauties," women whose beauty apparently caused all sorts of trouble. Of course the men who actually ignored their jobs and responsibilities to spend time and money on these "beauties" receive none of the blame. There are plenty of other examples but I'm not going back through to find them all now.
Positive: There are some cool women in Chinese history and I got to learn more about a few.