Women in Early Modern China

Catalog description

“Women in Early Modern China” explores the changes in the roles of women and the definition of gender relations that mark the early modern period (roughly, late fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries) in Chinese history. These changes were crucial to the conceptions of women and their place in society that shaped the modern feminist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Throughout the course we will be thinking about gender relations as relationships of power: about how power was gendered in political, economic, social, and cultural institutions and spheres; and about how the intersection of gender with class, religious belief, and medicine shaped power relationships. We will also be particularly attentive to women’s participation in these power relationships—that is, the ways in which they could (and did) reinforce, manipulate, exploit, subvert, or resist them.