Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture: Writings from the Pre-Qin Period through the Song Dynasty

I am a history major and am reading this for my Women in Chinese History course. I am really enjoying this collection of works!

This is a great book. It is what it says it is: images of women in Chinese thought and culture. The whole book is built on a simple formula: selected classical texts preceded by a commentary. This dive into the original ancient Chinese texts allows one to construct an idea (an image) of how womanhood was conceived, through ancient Chinese high culture. One should be aware that this is not a description of "de facto" woman's life, but the presentation of the ideal upon which every woman set herself against. One has to imagine the ignorant, the exceptions, the rogues, the "criminals", to depict "de facto" reality. In this exercise, by being allowed direct access to the historical literary sources, one creates a truer image of womanhood of those times, at the extent that one becomes somewhat of a historian.Furthermore, some of this images still pervade Chinese mindset today, to a certain degree, as these ideas, even when striped off their source and purpose, tend to be preserved in the behavior.I would not recommend this to be a first book on ancient Chinese culture, as without the previous knowledge of a wider context, it is difficult to fully enjoy this book. Neither it is adequate as an inquiry on the everyday life of a woman. It aims at grasping the ideal of the feminine, not a minutiae description of their everyday life.