University of Virginia Library

1 Introduction

It has long been held that throughout Chinese history women occupied
a position subordinate to men, inhabiting a sphere of activity that was
limited by ideology and social custom to serving the needs of a
patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal world. Occasionally a woman
might be able to surmount these constraints, but such instances were
considered aberrations. To early Western observers, the position of
women, like other aspects of China's history and culture, seemed to
change little from ancient times to the beginning of the twentieth
century. And what change there appeared to have been was for the
worse, such as the emergence of the practice of footbinding and the
adoption of Neo-Confucianism as orthodoxy from the Song dynasty
(960-1279) onward.

During the past quarter century, as approaches to the history of
women generally have advanced and become more sensitive and as
the handling of the Chinese sources has been refined, our understanding
of the position of women in Chinese history has grown more sophisticated.
Recent research has made it strikingly clear that the picture
is far more complicated and nuanced than would have been expected
just a few decades ago. Even so, little has been uncovered to suggest
that Chinese women were significantly better off than heretofore
thought, and while broad generalizations can no longer be made
without care and qualification, it does still seem appropriate to conclude
that Chinese women have seen their position—as manifested in social
status, legal protection, economic rights, and ideological valorization—
in continuing decline from earliest times to at least the end of the
nineteenth century.

This decline has not been entirely constant, however, and as one
might expect, changes in the position of women have paralleled changes
in other aspects of China's historical development and have experienced
a number of "turning points." The Song has long been considered one
of the most significant of these turning points, though "point" is
perhaps a misnomer for a span of three hundred years.[1] Chinese and
Western writers alike have pointed to Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, the

importance assigned to widow chastity, and footbinding as developments
during the Song that rationalized and enforced the
inferiority of women.[2] Recent research has shown, however, that the
matter is rather more involved. The idea that widows should remain
chaste and not remarry hardly began with the Song, and the new
emphasis given it was actually a post-Song development.[3] Moreover,
developments were not uniformly to the disadvantage of women. For
example, during the Song women enjoyed much greater property rights
than in earlier periods.[4]

In recent years, scholars have posited a second major turning point
in Chinese women's history: the Ming-Qing transition.[5] One writer has
pointed to the rise of a group of male critics who questioned such
repressive practices as widow chastity and suicide, footbinding and
concubinage. Some of these critics grew out of the new school of Han
Learning that challenged the assumptions of Song Neo-Confucianism,
while others were the product of a culture that sprang from increased
urbanization and commercialization and the spread of literacy among
elite women.[6] Other scholars have pointed to a growing women's
literary movement or to intellectual developments that, though they
might embody a reaffirmation of classical ideals and result in a
solidification of the existing gender system, generally represented
beneficial developments for Chinese women.[7] While these studies
underscore the need for a rethinking of received notions of the situation
of women during the Ming-Qing period, there has also been a recent
reminder that we must be careful in viewing discrete phenomena as
representative of broader and deeper developments. Kathryn Bernhardt
has noted that, when placed in a broader context, many of the beneficial
developments noted by others seem less striking and of diminished
import for the later rise of feminism and growing pressure for the
equality of women. Moreover, Bernhardt shows that, when one
considers the matter from the point of view of law, the important
transition in fact occurred earlier, between the Tang-Song and Ming-Qing
periods,[8] and that, rather than being beneficial, the change
actually brought decline in the legal status of women.[9]

The Song and the Ming-Qing transition are, of course, by no means
the only turning points in the history of Chinese women. During the
Qin-Han period as well, developments occurred that fundamentally
altered the direction of the history of Chinese women. As the examples
of later periods have demonstrated, however, these developments are
best understood in the broader context of the social, economic, and
political changes that were occurring at the time. One would naturally
expect that the creation of the centralized Chinese imperial structure
by the Qin [OMITTED] (221-206 B.C.) and Han [OMITTED] (206 B.C.-A.D. 220) emperors

would have enormous implications for social institutions, and this was
certainly the case where women and the family were concerned. One
of the most significant of these implications stemmed from the desire
of the imperial government to deal directly with the heads of families
rather than through a hierarchy of feudal-like subordinates. As Patricia
Ebrey has pointed out, Chinese patriarchy was to a very large extent
the product not of the classical period but of the early imperial state,
and patriarchal institutions and practices were reinforced by the policies
and laws adopted by the Qin and Han.[10]

The appearance of patriarchy was strongly supported by intellectual
developments. A gradual transformation of yin-yang [OMITTED] thought
took place during the Han that saw the nature of the feminine principle
of yin change from being complementary and equivalent to the male
principle of yang to being subordinate and inferior to yang.[11] The Han
also saw the compilation of the first texts explicitly intended to provide
examples of correct behavior for women. The first among the extant
examples of these, compiled during the Former Han, was Liu Xiang's
[OMITTED] (77-6 B.C.) Lie nü zhuan [OMITTED] [Biographies of Women]. Liu
presented examples of feminine virtues that were hardly intended to
promote expansion of the scope of women's activities outside
traditional roles. A section with a similar title and purpose became a
regular feature of the dynastic histories.[12] The second was the Nü jie
[OMITTED] [Precepts for Women], written during the Later Han by Ban Zhao
[OMITTED] (ca. 49-ca. 120).[13] Both works became extraordinarily influential
in later periods and were models for similar works right up to the
modern era.[14]

With the creation of the centralized imperial structure, the role and
function of royal wives necessarily changed as well. Marriages among
royal families of the pre-Qin states were largely between persons of the
same or nearly the same social standing, and they were contracted to
form political alliances between states or between states and the royal
Zhou house.[15] Once China was governed by a single imperial structure
with an emperor at its head, such marriages were no longer needed
or possible. An imperial wife was chosen from among the emperor's
subjects, and although her family might gain enormous influence
through the marriage, they could never be the equals of the imperial
family. At the same time, the exalted position of the emperor made him
more remote from his ministers and officers, presenting opportunities
for imperial wives and their families to exert extraordinary influence
over the government and the country through manipulation of the
mechanisms of imperial rule or even of the emperor himself. The
potential for mischief contained in this new situation and the threat
it posed to the empire became clear very early in the Former Han, when

Empress Lü [OMITTED] was able for a time to seize control of the government.
Coping with this problem would require a redefinition of the role and
function of imperial wives, to give them a place within the imperial
structure where they were clearly subordinate to the emperor and from
which they could not undermine the imperial family. But a new
definition of the role of the imperial wives had implications beyond the
imperial government, because it established a model for the place of
women generally, whether in the household or at court.

Despite the importance of the early imperial period for the history
of Chinese women, there has been relatively little study of women
during this era and even less that places them in the context of wider
social, economic, and political changes. Earlier studies tended to deal
with outstanding individuals, such as the historian and poet Ban
Zhao,[16] or with particular empresses.[17] Others have examined somewhat
broader issues, such as the influence of the imperial wives and
their relatives on court politics.[18] In most cases these studies have
followed the primarily political concerns of the sources on which they
have been based. More recently, however, historians of the Qin-Han
have undertaken new approaches, not simply looking at women as such
but examining the institutions that shape women's lives, such as
marriage and the family. T'ung-tsu Ch'ü's study of Han social structure,
for example, included chapters on marriage and the position of
women.[19] Although Ch'ü's work advanced our understanding of Han
society significantly and made available in translation a considerable
amount of primary source material, it suffered from treating the Qin-Han
period—a span of more than four hundred years—almost as
though it were a homogeneous block of time. One thus misses a sense
of the developments that occurred over the course of this period.
Subsequent writers have continued to focus on particular aspects of
women in early imperial China, gradually building up a body of
analytical literature and increasing our understanding of the subject.[20]
The fruits of their work not surprisingly reinforce the conclusions
reached by their colleagues studying the history of women in later
periods: Whereas the broad, impressionistic view may show women
to have been subject to social, ideological, and economic constraints,
closer examination reveals that the strength and relative importance of
these forces varied in response to social, economic, and political change.
This should caution us against being too quick to assume that we
understand what life might have been like for any woman—from
empress to peasant—in early imperial China.

The purpose of the present work is not to attempt a history of women
in early imperial China. Although we sketch the history of women from
earliest times through the Later Han—apparently in flagrant violation

of our own caveats against superficial studies—our aim is more modest.
Our hope is to contribute to the growing body of literature and
source material that will one day make possible the writing of that
history. Specifically, we have translated the three fascicles of Chen
Shou's Records of the Three States that are devoted to empresses and
consorts, together with the extensive material found in Pei Songzhi's
commentary to those chapters.

Records of the Three States is the history of the three independent
states of Wei [OMITTED] (220-265), Wu [OMITTED] (222-280), and Shu [OMITTED] (or Shu Han
[OMITTED], 221-263), which were established as a result of the dissolution
of the Han [OMITTED] empire (206 B.C.-A.D. 220). The parts translated here
are the "Hou fei zhuan" [OMITTED] [Biographies of Empresses and Consorts]
from the Wei section, the "Er zhu fei zi zhuan" [OMITTED] [Biographies
of the Consorts and Sons of the Two Sovereigns] from the
Shu section, and the "Fei pin zhuan" [OMITTED] [Biographies of Consorts
and Concubines] from the section devoted to Wu.[21] Because these deal
with the various wives and concubines of the successive heads of state
in the three regions, they form a topically coherent group.[22] The
biographies in this group are intrinsically interesting for what they tell
us about the lives of these women and their relatives, for the attitudes
toward women expressed in them, and for the light they shed on
historians' approaches to writing about women. A comparative study
of these sections can also deepen our understanding of the structure
and composition of the text of Records of the Three States as a whole.

The material in this prolegomenon is meant to give our texts and
their content a historical context. We discuss the treatment of women
by Han writers, how their views were influenced by political developments,
and how attitudes toward imperial spouses in particular
and women in general might have changed over time. Although we
believe the reader will find in our translation and discussion much that
is useful for understanding the history of women of this period, we feel
obliged to caution against assuming that these chapters present a
complete picture of the subject. There is much yet to be gleaned from
a careful study not only of Records of the Three States but of other
writings of the period. Still, taken as a whole, the three fascicles
presented here seem to provide a fuller picture of women in general
than do the chapters on empresses and consorts in the other histories
of the Han period. This has much to do with the differing natures of
the courts of the Three States. The chapter on the Wei comes closest
to the norm for a chapter on empresses and consorts, because the Wei
court was in many ways a continuation of the Han court, with all its
attendant titles and ritual. The Wu court, in contrast, to a very large
degree grew out of a series of marriages among regional elites, perhaps

more akin to those of the pre-Qin era than to those of the Han. And
the Shu Han court and the marriage patterns of Liu Bei [OMITTED] (161-223)
and Liu Shan [OMITTED] (207-271) were even further from the imperial
model of the Han. Thus these three chapters show us a variety of types
of women and possible spheres of activity for them. Moreover, the rich
variety of material found in Pei Songzhi's commentary presents us with
additional perspectives on the women, while allowing us to evaluate
Chen's historiography in the context of his time.

Finally, aside from whatever scholarly merit our modest effort might
have, it is our fervent hope that it will provide the nonspecialist (in
Chinese studies and beyond) an opportunity to appreciate better the
richness of this transitional period and the extraordinary people and
writing it produced.