Good thread, and it reminds me of a note in Ron Egan's book about Li Qingzhao, "The Burden of Female Talent," that breaks my heart every time I think of it.
To paraphrase Stephen Jay Gould in a different context, I think we should care less that there was one Li Qingzhao than we should that thousands of women of equal literary talent toiled in silence at the loom or the abacus all day or destroyed the little they permitted themselves to write.
Mourning Li Qingzhao's lack of social support as a female poet in historical China implies that our own modern society is more progressive and more likely to support female poets, but this is, sadly, not the case
Li Qingzhao would be equally fucked by our own society, just in different ways
I don’t think it does imply that, though, and I don’t know of any language in which a statement of the form “A is B” means “only A is B.” (“Blueberries are blue.” “Are you saying the sky isn’t?”)
But if we get down to it, no, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an obituary or eulogy praising the deceased for not studying something on account of their gender, and I don’t actually think our own society has the same strong normative bias against women writing things for mixed or public audiences.
Both China and Rabbinic Judaism had rich, deep literary traditions before 1500 CE--but strikingly low % women writers, even compared to how few there were in Xian Europe, not to mention Japan
IMHO it's bcuz where elites are defined by literacy, women's writing must be totally suppressed to maintain patriarchy (all these cultures were patriarchal). Bcuz in fact men have no natural advantage for writing
Despite orders of magnitude more literate people summed over time, traditional Chinese culture has no-one like Christine de Pizan. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christi...
This picture of Christine lecturing to a group of male nobles (one has a sword) was gasp-worthy in Europe, but unthinkable in China.
