Until the 1980s, a common narrative about women in China had been one of victimization: women had dutifully endured a patriarchal civilization for thousands of years, living cloistered, uneducated lives separate from the larger social and cultural world, until they were liberated by political upheavals in the twentieth century.
Beverly Bossler is professor of history at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of is Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity in China, 1000?00 and Powerful Relations: Kinship, Status, and the State in Sung China (960?79). Other contributors are Gail Hershatter, Emily Honig, Joan Judge, Guotong Li, Weijing Lu, Ann Waltner, Yan Wang, Ellen Widmer, and Yulian Wu.
