Q. Carefully Read Lessons for Women and write down your gut-reaction to this text. What is your foremost impression at this point? As a second step, carefully go over the text a second time, and write a one-sentence summary statement for each of the brief seven chapters of the text. Are there parts of the text that seem a bit different during your second reading?  As you do this, do you come upon passages that are not really addressed to young brides, but to another audience?

During an initial reading of Pan Chao’s Lessons for Women: Instructions in Seven Chapters for a Woman’s Ordinary Way of Life in the First Century C.E. several key themes jump out of the prose.  As a series of admonitions, the chapters come together as a set of instructions for the proper role of a girl child, young adult, and wife in 1st century Chinese society.  That the Lessons were written by a woman living 2,000 years ago is a remarkable fact of the prose, which serves to frame the initial reading.

In her introduction, the author of the Lessons, one Pan Chao, called ‘Foremost Woman Scholar of China, First Century C.E.’ by historian Nancy Lee Swann, Ph.D., recounts her long life as a servant, subject, mother, and wife, and admonishes her daughters, her presumed audience, to read and memorize the Lessons to demonstrate humility, proper custom, and good manners in their own roles as mothers, wives, and relatives. 

In Chapter 1, Chao exposits on humility, explaining to her readers that being humble is a woman’s primary duty, to be industrious, to serve, and to promote spiritual traditions.  The reward for humility is a woman’s honorable name. 

Chapter 2 relates the Yin and the Yang to the roles of control and service between two married people, and exhorts women to retain education as a means of learning to carry on a proper relationship and understand appropriate spiritual rites.

In Chapter 3 the author notes that domestic abuse, verbal fighting, and togetherness are antithetical to a wife’s responsibility to be gentle, compliant, and acquiescent.  This responsibility involves respect and caution, which Chao also relates to the Yin and Yang, where, relation to the marriage, the Yang is rigidity and the Yin, a yielding.

Chapter 4 posits that women should have four qualifications that should be treasured, and are the pinnacle of womanly virtue.  These qualifications include virtue, in practice, womanly bearing, womanly words, and womanly work. 

Chapter 5 begins with an explanation of marriage law, which states that women cannot remarry, and that men can.  Mishandling the ritual responsibility, displaying poor manners, neglecting the home, organizing with other women, and being frivolous or disheveled are reasons, according to Chao, that women lose husbands.  And under the law, divorced wives are still bound to their ex-husbands, and unable to marry again. 

In Chapter 6, Pan Chao instructs that, by implicit obedience, the virtuous woman defers to her parents-in-law as an extension of her fealty to her husband. 

Pan Chao observes in Chapter 7 that younger brothers- and sisters-in-law present with a unique family dynamic, but that by working in tandem to be modest and respectful they increase family and community pride.  Pan Chao admonishes the elder sister-in-law not to abuse her superior age or standing, noting that cooperation brings honor while abuse of position brings disgrace.

Several chapters are admonishments clearly aimed at other audiences.  As characterized by Chapter 7 and the call for in-laws to cooperate, Pan Chao understood that for married women to be virtuous and honored, the entire family was responsible for their own behaviors, helping to facilitate the myriad expressions of deference and familial piety required of brides.  In-laws are expected to express opinions that shape the bride’s life, part of the implicit obedience practiced by wives in a multifamily household, as outlined in Chapter 6.  Chapter 5 admonishes all women to agree not to assemble.  And in Chapters 2 and 3, Pan Chao mentions a husband’s role in supporting the education of his wife and young daughters, and that husbands should refrain from physical and verbal abuse, respectively.  In these mentions, the author hints at a sense of community that is required among family members and friends in order that the virtuous woman can bring the most honor to her and her husband’s families.

Q. Now read Lily Xiao-hong Lee’s commentary on Ban Zhao’s life and on the text, which is fairly representative of how this text has been viewed. Again, write down your thoughts. Does Lily Lee convince you with her very critical presentation of Ban Zhao?

  In The Virtue of Yin: Studies on Chinese Women, scholar Lily Xia Hong Lee concludes that Pan Chao constructed the Lessons for Women “with the intention of establishing a standard for women of all ages,” based on her observation that Pan Chao was too old to be communicating directly to her own daughters at the time she wrote the text, and because Pan Chao was an influential teacher whose writings would have certainly impacted contemporary young women.  In her essay, Lee also traces several accounts of contemporary women who did not adhere to the prescriptions in Lessons and a corresponding backlash by Eastern Han scholars to a “moral degradation” they perceived in the West. 

Lee determines that the prescriptions are oppressive, and that Pan Chao was relating “classical teaching” that advocated for “control” over women’s ideology, speech and behavior, divorce and remarriage, and their ideologies.  Her critical evaluation of the text may very well illuminate on the intent of the author, to prescribe restrictive behavior for young women, and presents the text as illiberal, even a proximate cause of revolution centuries later, but doesn’t address any materialist historiographical context to the prescriptions.  Because of this, the purposiveness in Chao’s writing, as a cruel miserly old rule maker, or a matronly educator, e.g., remains opaque.  As Lee found, there are few extant contemporary resources to properly contextualize women in 1st century CE Chinese civilization.

Q. Read Lin-Lee Lee's "Inventing Familial Agency from Powerlessness: Ban Zhao's Lessons for Women." This is an article published in a contemporary scholarly journal. It may be challenging to understand and require a little extra time. I suggest that you first read the abstract, which gives you a brief summary of the text, and then skim the text before reading it very carefully. You will encounter a few names that are not yet familiar. Use an online encyclopedia if you need additional information about some of the people Lee discusses in her paper. Briefly note what you think about this scholarly paper. Does Lin-Lee Lee make a convincing case for her understanding of the text? Did her article change your own understanding of the Lessons?

Turning to agency, then, as scholar Lin-Lee Lee explores in her essay “Inventing Familial Agency from Powerlessness: Ban Zhao’s Lessons for Women”, one can begin to scrape the surface of this materialist context after realizing that the text may be “forged out of the powerlessness of individual women, which is familial, communal, indirect and conferred by others."  Lee describes a version of agency that is different from Western agency, defined by self-reliance, e.g., and that dominated Chinese culture throughout its history, that is “familial…communal, [and]…conferred by others."  Lee goes on to compare the spirit of the prescriptions in Lessons with the behavior of a Russian-borne, blond-haired bride of Chinese statesman Chiang Ching-kuo.  In the early 20th century, Faina Ipatyevna Vakhreva and Ching-kuo fell in love and married under the watchful gaze of her husband’s family, Madame and Chiang Kai-Shek.  During this time of significant political upheaval in China, Faina adopted the behavior embodied in Pan Chao’s Lessons for Women, renouncing her politics, and fully submitting to the role of devout wife to Chiang Ching-kuo.  In time, she was fully accepted into the family, rarely appearing publicly even after her husband became president, and always a model for the expected behavior of an obedient wife in Chinese culture, as outlined in the Lessons.  Lee challenges the Western, feminist-themed analysis of the Lessons, like those of Lily Xia Hong Lee, noting they are “precisely the means through which a woman gains status and is able to affect family standing and, in turn, her status within it.".  External pressures, including a dominant agrarian economy, an explosion in Chinese population at the beginning of the Han dynasty in the first century CE (Ebrey 2010: 73), and other materialist factors may have compelled and shaped the economies and communities of women much like it did in other civilizations around the world, throughout history.

Q. Having read all three texts, please summarize in a concluding paragraph how you worked through the texts, how your thinking about Ban Zhao’s “Lessons” evolved as a result, and what your own perspective on “Lessons for Women” is now. (If you have ideas about potential other ways to interpret the text, please feel free to share those!! I love this opportunity to see your own scholarly mind at work! As you consider your own perspective, you may want to keep in mind that this text had to be copied by hand for several centuries by mostly male scholars, until printing was invented.)  Finally, please add a brief comment on how easy or challenging it was for you to read Ms. Lee's article. In case it was difficult, did it help to re-read it?  

Infanticide, veiling and polygyny, and other strategies, have been employed by societies in response to the phenomenon known as ‘The Brahmin Problem’.  This phenomenon occurs when too many eligible wives and older widows have been born into a society or community and presents the people with the challenge of caring for and sustaining their growing populations.  In the early Middle-East, for instance, polygyny and veiling arose in the culture partly as a means of providing women with a community, and a means of economy, allowing them to flourish and become influencers in their families and across society.  In the vein of Lin-Lee Lee’s notion of familial agency, the idea that environmental and economic factors also shaped the text of Lessons for Women must be considered.  Now, that is not to declare that “The Brahmin Problem’ is any sort of direct or proximate influence on the prescriptive measures delivered by Pan Chao, but only to note that a materialist analysis, like Lin-Lee Lee’s exposition on familial agency, revolving around the sociocentric culture and associated economies and influences of women, may add context to the Lessons, especially because there are few extant resources to contextualize the full experience and lifeways of ‘upper-class’ women in 1st century CE China. This is the way in which I worked through Pan Chao’s Lessons for Women and subsequent, scholarly articles offering additional perspectives on the Lessons’ context and historiography.  The articles in the bibliography are very easy to read and offer students immediate insight into methods of analyses in history that reflect the holistic nature of the social sciences today.

References

Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, 2nd ed. New York, New York. Cambridge Uinversity Press. 2010.

Lee, Lily Xiao Hong. The Virtue of Yin: Studies on Chinese Women. Broadway. NSW, Australia. Honolulu,Wild Peony. International Distribution, University of Hawaii. 1994.

Lee, Lin-Lee. "Inventing Familial Agency from Powerlessness: Ban Zhao's Lessons for Women." Western Journal of Communication.  Vol. 73, No. 1. 2009.

McKee, Nancy. “Gender in Cross Cultural Perspectives.” Lecture Series.  Washington State University, Pullman, 2015.

Swann, Nancy Lee. Pan Chao, Foremost Woman Scholar of China, First Century A.D.; Background, Ancestry, Life, and Writings of the Most Celebrated Chinese Woman of Letters. New York. Russell & Russell. 1968.