Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: New Order for the Old Order
- 1 State Building before 1644
- 2 The Shun-chih Reign
- 3 The K'ang-hsi Reign
- 4 The Yung-cheng Reign
- 5 The Ch'ien-lung Reign
- 6 The Conquest Elite of the Ch'ing Empire
- 7 The Social Roles of Literati in Early to Mid-Ch'ing
- 8 Women, Families, and Gender Relations
- 9 Social Stability and Social Change
- 10 Economic Developments, 1644–1800
- Bibliography
- Glossary Index
- Map 1. The Ch'ing empire – physical features. John K. Fairbank, ed. Late Ch'ing, 1800–1911, Part 1, Vol. 10 of The Cambridge History of China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), Map 1, p. xii."
- Map 2. Liaotung and vicinity in 1600. Frederic Wakeman, Jr. The great enterprise: The Manchu reconstruction of imperial order in seventeenth-century China (Berkeley, 1985), p. 40. Secondary source: Jonathan D. Spence and John E. Wills, Jr., eds., From Ming to Ch'ing: Conquest, region, and continuity in seventeenth-century China (New Haven, 1979), p. [2]."
- Map 5. Suppression of the “Three Feudatories.” Partly based on: Wang Ya-hsüan, Chungkuo ku-tai li-shih ti-t'u chi (Shenyang: Liao-ning chiao-yü, 1990) p. 163."
- Map 8. Ch'ing empire in 1759. Jacques Gernet. A History of Chinese Civilization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), Map 24, p. 476."
- Map 11. Distribution of Ming and Ch’ing Customs Houses Defining the Ch’ing Empire’s Integrated Market Economy (by the eighteenth century). Based in part on Map 2-1 in Fan I–chun, “Long-distance trade and Market integration in the Ming–Ch’ing Period 1400–1850.” Diss. Stanford University, 1992, Photocopy, Ann Arbor Michigan: UMI Dissertation Services, 1996."
- References
8 - Women, Families, and Gender Relations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: New Order for the Old Order
- 1 State Building before 1644
- 2 The Shun-chih Reign
- 3 The K'ang-hsi Reign
- 4 The Yung-cheng Reign
- 5 The Ch'ien-lung Reign
- 6 The Conquest Elite of the Ch'ing Empire
- 7 The Social Roles of Literati in Early to Mid-Ch'ing
- 8 Women, Families, and Gender Relations
- 9 Social Stability and Social Change
- 10 Economic Developments, 1644–1800
- Bibliography
- Glossary Index
- Map 1. The Ch'ing empire – physical features. John K. Fairbank, ed. Late Ch'ing, 1800–1911, Part 1, Vol. 10 of The Cambridge History of China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), Map 1, p. xii."
- Map 2. Liaotung and vicinity in 1600. Frederic Wakeman, Jr. The great enterprise: The Manchu reconstruction of imperial order in seventeenth-century China (Berkeley, 1985), p. 40. Secondary source: Jonathan D. Spence and John E. Wills, Jr., eds., From Ming to Ch'ing: Conquest, region, and continuity in seventeenth-century China (New Haven, 1979), p. [2]."
- Map 5. Suppression of the “Three Feudatories.” Partly based on: Wang Ya-hsüan, Chungkuo ku-tai li-shih ti-t'u chi (Shenyang: Liao-ning chiao-yü, 1990) p. 163."
- Map 8. Ch'ing empire in 1759. Jacques Gernet. A History of Chinese Civilization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), Map 24, p. 476."
- Map 11. Distribution of Ming and Ch’ing Customs Houses Defining the Ch’ing Empire’s Integrated Market Economy (by the eighteenth century). Based in part on Map 2-1 in Fan I–chun, “Long-distance trade and Market integration in the Ming–Ch’ing Period 1400–1850.” Diss. Stanford University, 1992, Photocopy, Ann Arbor Michigan: UMI Dissertation Services, 1996."
- References
Summary
This chapter traces the rising visibility of commoner households and the growth of extrafamilial networks of homosociability in early Ch'ing to 1800. Both were intimately related to the population growth and patterns of mobility during this period. The expansion of arable land and a commercial revolution in farming, proto-industry, and trade; the growth of guilds and native place associations; intense competition for upward mobility; and the movement of male sojourners and migrants all make this a crucial period in the history of the Chinese family.
An elite model of family relationships, complete with surnames, ancestors, and rituals, was widely embraced in commoner households during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians have generally treated this “traditional” Chinese family as the culmination of a long-term and continuous civilizing process. In this chapter, by contrast, the commoner household is analyzed as a contingent historical phenomenon, the result of conditions unique to the seventeenth century: late Ming tax reforms, the breakdown of hereditary occupational barriers from the late Ming onward, the increased popular interest in rituals and lineage formation that followed the Ch'ing conquest, and so on. The commoners registered in “households” (hu), the “families” to which this chapter refers, are the explicit subject of early Ch'ing tax records, statecraft writings, legal cases, fiction, and drama. Their prominence in the early Ch'ing period is coupled with a parallel development: the growth of sojourning networks that enabled households to strategize to improve their prospects both economically and socially by deploying male labor abroad while keeping female labor at home.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of China , pp. 428 - 472Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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