ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that one of the durable tensions in Chinese society surrounding religion is the potential conflict between the demands of religion and the demands of family. Ming religion might have seemed familiar to a person from Song or Yuan times, but gender relations would have seemed quite different. While the nature of the evidence is fragmentary at best, it also seems that by the sixteenth century women are playing a more important role in religion. Guanyin, a bodhisattva who is represented as having both male and female forms, is an excellent starting point to a discussion of gender and religion in late imperial China. The new religions which focused on the Eternal Unborn Mother which emerge in the sixteenth century not only foregrounded a female deity but offered actual women the possibility of leadership positions.
