She draws from advice books, biographies, government documents, and medical treatises to show that although the family continued to be patrilineal and patriarchal, women found ways to exert their power and authority. Ebrey questions whether womens situations actually deteriorated in the Sung, linking their experiences to widespread social, political, economic, and cultural changes of this period. She argues that the ideas, attitudes, and practices that constituted marriage shaped womens lives, providing the context in which they could interpret the opportunities open to them, negotiate their relationships with others, and accommodate or resist those around them. Focusing on marriage, Patricia Buckley Ebrey views family life from the perspective of women. In this thoroughly original work, one of the most respected scholars of premodern China brings to life what it was like to be a woman in Sung times, from having a marriage arranged, serving parents-in-law, rearing children, and coping with concubines, to deciding what to do if widowed. Yet there were also improvements in womens status in marriage and property rights. This was a time when footbinding spread, and Confucian scholars began to insist that it was better for a widow to starve than to remarry. Especially when the end of that relationship is so terribly tragic.About the Book Opening up questions about womens lives, about gender, about why we read history at all and how we write it, Patricia Buckley Ebrey has made The Inner Quarters a place we need to enter.-from the Foreword Book Synopsis The Sung Dynasty (960-1279) was a paradoxical era for Chinese women. How strong young love is and feels - and how that connection and memory can truly last into adulthood. love reading books set in WWII and this one has really hit the spot for me.This book really moved me - I think many of us can remember back to when we were young and to that summer when our lives completely changed forever. It flashes back and forth from current times to when she was a little girl - and we learn more and more about the truth of the story. Framboise went back to the village as an older woman (with a different last name) and kept her identity a secret and opened a very successful restaurant. The premise of the story seems to be that the girl's mother gave information to the soldiers and was ran out of the village in shame. This is the story of a woman (Framboise) who owns a restaurant (of course, Joanne Harris and her food books!) in France who was a young girl during WWII and when the German soldiers were patrolling the area.

Five quarters of the orange