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"When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talking-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage all over China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family." This is part of Maxine Hong Kingston's account of her upbringing in a first-generation Chinese-American family. She writes in The Woman Warrior how she found the norms of American womanhood incredibly constricting compared to the mythology of her Chinese ancestry.

In contrast the classic picture of Chinese women in Western writing, up to and including at least some examples in the current days, is of a bit-player in the history of the empire, "downtrodden, yet stoic, lacking in legal rights, hobbled by the bindings of her feet, and at the service, body and soul, of her husband and his family". It is a picture of traditional China which is still widely promulgated. Take for example The Sydney Morning Herald in 1992: "Traditionally you could knock on a door in rural China and if a woman answered she would say `no-one is at home'." It was reading Kingston's story which first attracted me to the topic of the position of women in imperial China. Its tales of powerful warrior women, which I later learnt were based on traditional legends, simply did not correspond with the second image, of the helpless, frightened, uneducated young bride, slave to her mother-in-law and to the fierce desire for a son. Certainly Kingston was writing in America, but she was writing about a highly traditional family background from "old China". It was a desire to reconcile these two pictures - the pathetic and the warlike - which drew me to this topic.

Mann surveying Chinese writing about the behaviour of widows recounts a classic tale of a chaste, self-sacrificing mother, then that of a licentious, bawdy profligate widow. "Will the real Chinese widow please stand up!" she exclaims in frustration. It is a difficult task, but the search for the "real Chinese woman" is the basis of this work. Its central assumption is that the models now in use to search for her are inadequate.

Before indicating the direction this work will take it is worth surveying in some detail the nature of the existing work on the position of women in imperial China, its sources and the motivations and attitudes of those who conducted it. Up until very recently almost all of the writing about women in China has been so strongly influenced by either the attitudes or motivations of its writers as to be, not quite valueless, but certainly severely flawed.

Interest in the West in the position of women in China, in terms of published works, peaked first from around 1890 to about 1920. Works published then were often translations or adaptations of indigenous works by Europeans who lived in the country and who operated from a Eurocentric perspective. These scholars who first exposed China to Western gaze were far from immune from the phallocentrism of their own culture.

As Weidner notes in regard to art historians, they "seldom paid much attention to the work of East Asian women" although the Eastern works on the topic recognized women's efforts, albeit in a somewhat demeaning way. Thus the prejudice of the East was added to the prejudice of the West and women as actors in their own right - as painters, poets, political powers and people - virtually disappeared. The trend was exacerbated by fictional works set in China of the time which stressed a strongly Orientalist view of Chinese women as weak, passive victims. Much of the work on the position of Chinese women has concentrated on the Chiing dynasty, which late 19th century writers could observe first-hand. But it should not be forgotten that this was a time of foreign domination and decline, during which the ruling dynasty (following the pattern of the Ming) consciously adopted extreme Neo-Confucianism to secure its rule.

This doctrine had first become well-established in the late Sung, with the founding father being Chu Hsi, who stressed the inferiority of women and the need for strict segregation of the sexes. There was an extreme morality and puritanism which (as has been seen in many other cultures) is normally highly detrimental to the position of women. It spread widely through the population during the Ming and reach its zenith in the Chiing. The writers who portray the 19th century as normal and typical of the millenia of Chinese imperial history ignore the many differences between Confucianism and neo-Confucianism. They also ignore the very many other religious, social and cultural influences which affected Chinese social mores and actions throughout more than three thousand years. In addition these writers tend to present a monolithic picture of society while in fact from the later sixteenth century (before foreign ideas can have had much influence) critiques of the strict norms being set out for family life begins to emerge. Criticism of footbinding is found as early as the Sung.

Many early writers were missionaries, who wanted to provide the most negative possible view to encourage both financial and political support for their activities. A Chinese women of the time wrote that Western missionary women believed, simplistically, that women of the east were "close prisoned slaves of their husbands, idle and ignorant and soulless, with no thoughts above their petty household cares and the strange heathen gods they worship". It was an image scholars were happy to promulgate. The sorts of problems which occurred are beautifully summed up in a book published in 1891 under the title Typical Women of China. It was in fact a translation of didactic stories written to describe "perfect Confucian women" but it was presented to Western readers as stories of actual lives. This fault of scholarship was well recognised by a few at the time, but they had little success in making the academic or general audience see it. As Lieu wrote in 1917 "we do not see things as they are ... (but) as they are represented in an idealized form as found in ancient books".

The careless or purposeful exaggeration of the miseries of the position of women is beautifully demonstrated in Werner's The Myths and Legends of China, first published in 1922, the section on "the sociology of the Chinese" states that "infanticide was frequent, especially in the case of female children" but only two lines later admits that the practice was "practically absent in a large number" of provinces. The internal contradiction is obvious. Similarly van Gulik, although providing much valuable information, is not immune from misogyny. He comments "the downfall of the Ming dynasty illustrates the ancient Chinese saying that `a beautiful woman can overthrow an Empire'. A quarrel over a concubine caused a rift between the two great Ming generals" who might have held off the Manchus. The point hardly needs to be made that surely this is the fault of the generals rather than the woman concerned! As in the case of Typical Women of China, very much of the work on Chinese women has been based either on the classical Confucian and neo-Confucian literature, which deals almost exclusively in idealised stereotypes of daughters, wives and mothers, rather than women as individuals. It is prescriptive rather than descriptive, written almost exclusively by scholarly males, often in official positions or from that background. Their writings about issues such as widow chastity and faithfulness are usually vehement, which might in itself be seen as evidence that this behaviour was not the norm, or at least that the prescriptions being offered were frequently ignored. We must be careful not to take these statements of the ideal as evidence of actual behaviour.

Up until very recently, these pictures were generally accepted, and women were simply not considered in Western scholarship about China unless the topic was "the family". A classic example is the Dictionary of Ming Biography, published in 1976, which follows what many other disciplines would suggest is an outmoded method of study, simply detailing as much as is known about the lives of about 1000 Ming dynasty people with virtually no background or social information. Or perhaps I should have said the lives of men, for among the individual entries less than 10 refer directly to women, although women whose actions could only be described as significant appear under their husband's, brother's or father's entries.

Chinese women are often grouped together with other "Orientals" (Islamic nations, India and Japan being the common generalisation). Not only in the popular Western mind, but also it seems all too often in the scholarly mind, the worst aspects of all these cultures ran together, to produce the perfect picture of the oppressed Eastern female. This was a picture that often had more than a little to do with the sexual fantasies of the male scholars. There is very much the problem of judgment and comparison. Cooper comments disapprovingly that "in times of famine girls are sold for very small amounts of money or exchanged for the more precious rice". Yet this ignores the fact that in such famines many thousands, or even millions could starve, and this might be a way of ensuring the survival of both the girl and the rest of the family. As even Levy notes, it is not unreasonable to compare footbinding to the drastic corsets of European society of a similar period.

Moving to native Chinese scholarship it has been even more complicated by contemporary political questions. Feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was intimately linked with wider nationalistic goals and this situation continued under the communists. They introduced a new marriage law in 1950, the preamble of which stated "the supremacy of man over woman ... is abolished". The increasing freedom of women, and their chances to be pilots, train drivers or administrators was seen by both the regime and outsiders as one of the triumphs of communism .

Thus there was and is a natural desire to stress and perhaps amplify the misery of women's position in the preceding period. This was amplified by the political situation during much of recent Chinese history, in which scholarship has been subsumed to the perceived needs and ideology of the state.

There is an additional complication in China, that of access. Between the late 1930s and very recently it was largely closed to Western scholars, so access to the generation which experienced the end of imperial China was virtually closed off. Often there was a reliance on studies in Taiwan or Hong Kong, but these were a self-selected and very small percentage of the Chinese race, and selecting them as representatives of the whole had its problems. Even prior to that period, the access of most writers to Chinese women was very limited, or in the case of males often non-existent.

In short then, I am suggesting that because of all of these factors, any writing about the position of women in China published before about 1980 needs to be approached cautiously. What is available tends to be highly generalised, based on assumptions that didactic texts reflected reality and often more influenced by the writer's attitudes or political requirements than the evidence.

We come then to modern studies on Chinese social life. It is an area which has increasingly attracted the interest of feminists, yet their work has often adopted a curiously similar approach to earlier work even while criticising it. Women are still portrayed as the hopeless victims of the system. This is notable in Daly's stress on footbinding and in recent work looking at the changes in women's position wrought by the Communist revolution. Very recent work, almost exclusively published in the last 15 years, has adopted a more evenhanded approach, often using feminist analysis but in a more culturally sensitive and situation-specific way. Among the works I would include in this category are a collection of essays on female Japanese and Chinese painters , work on the position of palace women and on the interaction of Chinese women and their mother's families.

Holmgren, who fits squarely in this category, shows that even studies of the neo-Confucian idealised biographies can provide information on the likely level of divergence from the ideal picture they contain. But many of these writers find themselves frequently pointing out that their work is only scratching the surface of understanding the position of women in imperial China. They almost all make references to the many questions which remain to be answered. These then are the problems which I perceive in a large amount of the existing scholarship about the position of Chinese women. What is needed, I would suggest, is a newly critical examination of the classical sources which have been used for studies on the position of women in imperial China, and a broadening of the sources used. The Confucian and neo-Confucian classics and the didactic literature have, as I have suggested above, been already very heavily mined for the information they can provide on the position of women in imperial China. That work would, I suggest, benefit from a serious re-examination of its conclusions about the actual life-experiences of real women. But rather than go over that ground I will instead be looking to alternative sources which seem to have been scarcely touched when the overall position of women is being considered.

With a few exceptions no one has mined the rich seam of non-Confucian literature for information on the lives of women in imperial China. Firstly deserving examination I suggest are the religious/mythological stories of largely popular culture, stories which made up much of the structures of popular Taoism and Buddhism. I will also look briefly at these two religions and their impact on the position of women.

Secondly I will look at fiction and poetry. Relatively little has survived from very early periods, but from the Tang, and particularly the Sung (960-1279) onwards there are many short stories, novels and plays, often with long provenance, which were written down them in the vernacular language (unlike all earlier work which was in the classical language to which only very limited parts of society had access).

Early works were based on oral story-tellers' tales but gradually the short story and novel developed as independent genres, although the topics, usually the life, loves and disasters of urban dwellers, remained similar. They are thus an ideal way of getting some picture of the lives of women, for it seems reasonable to assume such stories would have had considerable similarities with the lives of their audience. They would also have provided models of behaviour, often very different to Confucian ones, for its members. In later periods there was resistance to these works, which were often seem as improper or immoral, but this doesn't seem to have seriously affected their popularity. In both the Confucian and non-Confucian sources we are of course, with the exception of Pan Chao and a few women poets, usually hearing male views about female life, morals and character, and moreever the view of a small group of elite males. Since these androcentric sources are all that is available we must mine from them what we can, trying not only to hear what the writer meant for his audience, but also any hints or indications of factors the writer might have wanted to play down.

Finally I will survey briefly a selection of the lives of actual Chinese women on which we have information. This is not meant to be a representative sample. Instead what I am doing is demonstrating that there is ample evidence many women stepped outside the roles and expectations which most scholarship has portrayed as absolute limitations, and acted in various ways as independent, creative, functional and pro-active free agents. In studying these three areas there are of course still many problems. One of the most notable is interpreting just what rules and actions really meant to the actors at the time, separated from us by both time and culture. For example widow celibacy is customarily viewed as victimisation, but as Mann notes, "in a society where purdah was not observed, and spatial segregation of the sexes was not common ... a claim on widow chastity sanctioned by family, community and state constituted a real form of protection against sexual abuse".

Polygamy was no doubt a disaster many women but it could also create a powerful sisterhood. Shen Fu, a Chiing scholar who wrote an autobiography in which his loving relationship with his wife plays a prominent part, also writes of his wife's desire to find him a concubine. She finds a woman she likes and wants very much to bring to the household as a friend. Shen Fu writes "as happy as old friends at a reunion, they soon set off hand in hand to climb the hill in search of all the scenic spots it offered".

The problem of interpretation is not one that can be easily solved, nor is it without philosophical dilemmas. A Chinese imperial woman might have said and believed that the motivation for an action was one thing, while from a modern perspective we might describe this as false consciousness. There is no answer to this conundrum, except I would suggest that it is important to explore both the ancient and modern viewpoints, without necessarily attempting to iron out the contradictions.

Through these three sources, the non-Confucian religious works and myths, the popular literature and the actual lives, I am not suggesting that I am able to definitively identify the "real" Chinese imperial woman. But I believe these offer hints and suggestions as to where she might be found within the overall framework of imperial Chinese society. I am suggesting that what is needed is a different model from the oppressed powerless creature which has been the starting point for most other work on the subject.

One of the obvious problems of this essay is that it covers a huge span of Chinese history, the rise and fall of foreign and indigenous dynasty and of classes, and the ascendancy and decline of various social ideas. But this is not as great a problem as it might be if I had set myself a more ambitious project. I am not attempting to outline the position of women in the 3000 plus years of Chinese history, but rather to point out the flaws and problems in our existing picture, for which I believe my general approach is appropriate. For the sake of simplicity by and large I will be concentrating on traditional Chinese society and ignoring both the Mongol and Manchu ruling groups, whose women found themselves under different rules and strains to those experienced by their Chinese sisters.

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A few useful links

Directory of open access journals

Women Watch

Unifem

H-Women

The F-word

Femina