ABSTRACT
In her narrative script for a southern-style performance (tanci) written in 1904, Qiu Jin arranges a scene in a gentry household wherein the father is engaged in a conversation with an elder cousin who tutors his son. The teacher first reports on the scholarly merits of his pupil and then proposes to offer his pupil’s younger sister the same schooling: “She is highly intelligent and has been learning to read and write remarkably well.” The father replies with questions: “What’s the use of such study to a girl, since it’s impossible for her to bring glory to the family like a man? Even if she were endowed with eight bushels of talent, when did the government ever establish official exams for women?”3 Those questions implicitly confirm recent feminist historiography that explicates how elite Chinese women gained high level of literary cultivation in “the high Qing period” (1683-1839) with a developed female writing tradition behind them that can be traced as early as Tang Dynasty. The Confucian teaching that “virtuous women are those who do not have literary talent” in this sense ironically invalidates any assumption that women by their bioethnic definition lack the thinking and writing faculty.4 The father’s objection is not based on any notion that marks “femaleness” as such inherent lack. Rather, he points to the unavailability of institutions whereby women’s learning may gain social values.5 The problem about women’s reading and writing, then, is a problem about the structures of institutional recognition, mechanisms of regulatory rewards, and arrangements of social worth.
