A Study Of The Living Conditions Of The Maidservants From The 16th To The 18th Century In China

Maidservants were a special female group in ancient China who showed a series of noteworthy characteristics such as their identity, social status, special social role and living tactics that comprised important subjects in the female history and social history. What is more important is that the research into maidservants'living conditions can promote deeper understanding of their diverse and multi-stratified features. In the perspective of social history, the comprehensive and systematic research into maidservants also has a great significance in deepening the understanding of pariahs'living conditions during the Ming and Qing period. On the basis of the academic research achievements, this thesis, which consists of six chapters, systematically analyses the maidservants'living conditions from the 16th to the 18th century.Chapter One is"women's living space". It summarizes how the factors of the times produced the effect on the respectable women's degenerating into maidservants from the 16th to the 18th century. The prosperity of commodity economy blurred the boundary between the respectable people and the pariahs, stimulated more and more people to live luxuriously, impinged on the frail small family and therefore created a trend that more and more women left their family to make a living in the outside world. However, the prosperity of commodity economy did not provide women with a bigger living space. On the contrary, a considerable amount of women were pushed out of the traditional working field due to the specialization and technological changes of the production. At the same time, the popular ideology that women should stay at home was strengthened which hindered women from taking the other careers.Chapter Two deals with"the tendency of maidservants'increase in number and its causes."By investigating that maidservants existed widely in various social strata and the major means that women degenerated into maidservants, this chapter outlines the tendency of maidservants'increase in number. As to its causes, in respect of the heavy pressure of making a living, this chapter first pointed out the important effect produced by the land annexation, the heavy taxation, the exploitation of usury and the expansion of the remains of slavery at the beginning of Qing Dynasty to the central part of China. This chapter points out, in respect of the female gender, that the increase in number of maidservants was promoted by the deformed ideology that men were honorable while women humble, the luxurious mode of life in the society, and the existence of the specialized group and intermediaries in buying and selling of maidservants. The chapter also analyzes the action of the less privileged families'selling of their daughter as a maidservant and reveals that the essence of this action was a moral variation under the heavy economic pressure.Chapter Three discusses"maidservants'social position and living conditions."This chapter mainly explores the maidservants'practical living conditions and aims to describe comprehensively and deeply an overall perspective of maidservants actual living environment. This chapter firstly draws the outline of maidservants'living conditions in the respect of national law and family rules. Secondly, this chapter investigates maidservants'actual life and offers author's discovery that under the umbrella term of laborer, the maidservants'roles can be further divided. Meanwhile, maidservants'practical living conditions varied according to the different roles they played in their masters'family.Chapter Four,"Maidservants'Marriage", makes a careful investigation of maidservants'marriage in the respect of its rich connotation, the related regulations in the national law, the practical implementation of these regulations in the host family and maidservants'actual marital conditions. This investigation not only shows that maidservants'marriage and their role in the host's family changed constantly, but also shows that the multiply co-existed features of their special marriage which was different from normal women. The conclusion tends to show that marriage is a way for maidservants to return to a woman's normal family life. It is also a way for maidservants to become a member of the higher-class family and change her humble identity.Chapter Five is"the research on loyal maidservants."This chapter discusses the existence of"loyal maidservants"in actual social life and that described in literary works. This chapter analyzes the phenomenon of"loyal maidservants"existed in the practical society in the respects of its definition, classification and forming causes. The author believes that the public opinion that highly praised their loyalty, maidservants'subjective self-identification with this ideology, their mental-variation and self-satisfaction worked together to the making of the phenomenon. By examining the enthusiasm showed by literary authors in portraying"loyal maidservants"and the characteristics of the times reflected by those literary"loyal maidservants", the author believes that the writers tended to rectify the relationship between the host and the maidservant and normalize the sexual relations by propagating the images of loyal maidservants. The chapter concludes that loyal maidservants were beautified by the authority's propaganda and literary authors'praising articles whose aim was to alleviate the contradiction between hosts and maidservants.Chapter Six is"maidservants'social ideology—a case study of the ideas about controlling maidservants."This chapter takes the admonitory remarks, in which the gentry's thought can be reflected, as the main historical materials and analyzes the maidservants'social ideology at that time according to those materials. In the admonitory remarks, both negative and positive opinion existed. The former advised taking careful precaution against maidservants and admonishing them sternly. The latter advised treating maidservants well and communicating with them, which is identical with the Confucian tradition of"saving the world with morality."However, the practical feasibility of those norms was far from the anticipated goal as the order between the host and the maidservant were steady in then China.In the conclusion, in addition to making clear the basic conclusions based on this research, this part further points out that the phenomenon of maidservants existed from the 16th to 18th century showed that the prosperity of commodity economy strengthened women's personal appendage, that the complexity of social classes and the slavery elements existed long in traditional China. At the same time, the research strategy in which social history and female view are combined is a useful way when women belonging to other classes are investigated.