Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family

Susan Mann’s pioneering book, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford University Press, 1997), was a breakthrough work by one of the late twentieth century’s most accomplished social historians. It made upper-class women of the eighteenth century Jiangnan region of China visible, showed how gender can illuminate social change in law, culture, and economy, and argued powerfully that even while confined to the domestic “inner quarters,” elite women like these could ..