A review of Patricia Buckley Ebrey’s book, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period.
The book analyzes and reviews Patricia Buckley Ebrey’s book, “The Inner Quarters: Marriage and Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period” which examines the lives of Sung women in relationship to their interactions with their own blood families, their husbands, their husband’s families and their own children. The paper also raises several inadequacies of the book.
Another problem, or perhaps more an inadequacy of the book, is contained within what could be taken as Ebrey’s thesis statement. She says in the Introduction that she intends to focus on, the intersection of women and marriage (7). While it can be clearly seen from the text that marriage or widowhood was the usual status of women, the book’s decision to exclude accounts of single women is disappointing. However small a percentage, society would have contained women without dowries, divorced women, and women who remain single for religious reasons, such as Buddhist nuns. An exploration into their place in society would have been an interesting contrast.