Precious Records: Precious Records

“This is a wonderfully rich study, based on wide reading of the sources and crafted in a readable style. It is an important contribution to feminist scholarship's project of recovering the 'traditional’ Chinese woman, making visible the complexity of gender relations in a society too often simply pigeonholed as one of history's most successful patriarchies. This is an elegant addition to the small body of high-quality studies that are putting gender into the mainstream of late imperial Chinese history.”—Charlotte Furth, University of Southern California

Placing women at the center of the High Qing era shows how gender relations shaped the economic, political, social, and cultural changes of the age, and gives us a sense of what women felt and believed, and what they actually did, during this period.

Susan Mann is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Local Merchants and the Chinese Bureaucracy, 1750-1950 (Stanford, 1987).