ABSTRACT
Female religious sites have a long tradition in Chinese social history. Whilst patriarchal Chinese society was defined by a spatial segregation which anchored ancestral worship in a patrilineal and patrilocal social structure, leaving women relatively few alternatives to wife and motherhood in the familial sphere, organized religion offered both escape and a degree of choice. If women, in Julia Kristeva’s classic interpretation, are more commonly associated with space, ‘generating and forming the human species’ whereas ‘father’s time’ is ‘time, becoming or history’ (in Moi, 1986: 190), it has also been the case that throughout history women have chosen to disrupt the spatial connection with ‘the hearth’ of womb-centred identity for life in ‘the temple’ of religious women’s communities. Women’s insistence on their rights of survival, their courage in the face of overpowering odds, and their capacity to adapt themselves to the changes in their environments are evident in the documents that have survived and the stories we were told. Their persistent, intrepid bravery has challenged us to understand the meaning of Funü jiefang (women’s liberation) from alternative points of view and from too often marginalized spaces in which their religious life evolved over the centuries. These provided opportunities for women to transcend—sometimes even transgress—the status quo in which social and gender relations had appeared unchanging and outside the time-lines of master narratives of history.
