Female Hands: Embroidery as a Knowledge Field in Women’s Everyday Life in Late Imperial and Early Republican China
Author(s)
Fong, Grace S.
Abstract
In late imperial China, female hands performed various tasks that had to be learned, from mundane, gender-specific work such as binding the feet, holding an infant, weaving, sewing, embroidering, preparing food, to more exalted forms of cultural performance such as playing a musical instrument, holding a book to read, or moving a brush over the surface of paper to write or paint. Many of these activities required or implied extensive training and discipline; some entailed rigorous and regular practice from a young age. The skillful female hand, then, in a metaphoric as well as literal sense, gave rise to the productivity and visibility of many Chinese women recovered by contemporary historians and scholars of literature.
