The gendering of power in the family and the state

SCOTT WELLS AND PING YAO

The formation of states, empires, and trans-regional networks across Eurasia and northern Africa led to dramatic transformations in both social and political relations between men and women.

Marriage, family, and the inheritance of property and status

There is no universal or standard form of marriage, just as there is no universal or standard type of family, so to identify how state-formation or the emergence of trans-regional networks affected marriage and the family is no straightforward task.

Whether polygamous or monogamous, marital unions were endogamous with respect to the social category they were designed to enhance and perpetuate through investment of property and production of children. But this endogamy could be with respect to categories other than kin, such as socio-economic class, civic or political identity, or religious allegiance. State­formation, empire building, and the expansion of trans-regional networks changed the definitions and practices of endogamy by expanding the number and extent of economic and social bonds of the community beyond the kin-based and local emphasis of their pre-state and pre-urban condition, even as the conjugal (binding-together) and reproductive purposes of marriage remained in place. Indeed, marriage could function to preserve and reinforce local socio-economic networks in an environment of expanding trans-regional economies and interstate competition.

In India, for example, the proliferation of cities, interregional networks, and the expansion of kingdoms over the course of the Vedic period (c.

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non-caste persons.

In Nara (710-794 ce) and Heian (794-1185 ce) Japan, by comparison, status endogamy among the elite was expressed through uxorilocal marriage arrangements (in which the husband moved from his parent's residence to live with his new wife's family). This practice could be used to forge long­standing political and economic alliances, creating multi-generational net­works of exchange between prominent families to their mutual benefit in preserving or enhancing social status.

Marriage, family, and inheritance in the Mediterranean world

In the democratic city-states of Classical Greece (c. 490-323 bce), marriages tended to be endogamous to members of each city's citizen class, although marriages that united a citizen man and citizen woman of two different city­states were also recognized as legitimate. Marriage, for the male citizen, was a marker of entry into full adulthood; the citizen wife, however, retained the legal status of a child, with her legal claims and rights (e.g. in property disputes) exercised on her behalf through a male guardian, whether her husband or her father. Slaves and other non-citizen foreigners could not form or be part of legitimate, civic marital unions. Even as other forms of alliance (political, economic, and sexual) were proliferating among and within the city-states in the era of the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars (fifth century bce), marital bonds remained exclusive to the citizenry, and thereby a key mechanism for preserving the population and property that undergirded the political autonomy of the polis.

Athenian marital and inheritance practices were typical for Greek city­states. Sparta, however, proved a notable exception, in that it allowed citizen women as well as men to own, bequeath, and inherit property. Because Spartan men were in a constant state of war, particularly against the subject helot population of Messenia, they were often absent from the territory of Sparta itself. Allowing women to own property outright therefore recognized and incentivized the need for wives to participate in estate management beyond the household. Spartan women also uniquely received public educa­tion and physical training alongside men, with the express purpose of preparing them to bear and raise strong and effective citizens for the polis. The Spartan constitution even encouraged polyandry to ensure preservation of the citizen class and its wealth, stipulating that an old man who married a young wife should select a younger citizen man to have children with his wife; similarly, any married man could approach another man's wife, as long as she had already had children, and - with her husband’s permission - have children with her instead of his own wife.

Neither the Macedonian nor the Roman conquests radically changed mar­ital or inheritance practices in the Greek city-states. The Hellenistic royal families (323-30 bce) formed a close, endogamous ruling class: Seleucid kings married Antigonid and Ptolemaic princesses, and Antigonid kings married Seleucids and Ptolemies, while Ptolemaic monarchs preferred to marry their own siblings following pharaonic precedent.^[91] Rome, in turn, restricted the Roman law and practice of conubium to Roman citizens, excluding conquered free peoples (i.e. non-slaves) integrated into the empire by requiring them to retain their local traditions regarding marriage and inheritance until such time as they might be granted Roman citizenship. As Rome expanded from city-state to a regional power in the fourth century bce, marital unions were exogamous with respect to lineage, but endogamous with respect to socio­political status. Patricians would intermarry with other patricians, equestrians with equestrians, and plebeians with plebeians, blurring the boundaries of kin as part of the process of solidifying the collective wealth and prerogatives of social class. As Rome then expanded into a Mediterranean-wide empire between the third and first centuries bce, two developments in marriage practice occurred. First, as the expanding empire opened up new opportunities in commerce and state service to Roman citizens, creating an increase in wealthy equestrian and plebeian families, cross-class marriages within the category of Roman citizen became more common. Second, the power of the male head of the household over his wife substantially decreased. Originally, the standard Roman marriage moved the woman from her father's patriapo- testas to her husband's. In this conubium cum manu, the husband gained the absolute authority of a paternal guiding hand over his wife's property and behavior. However, as Rome increased its territorial and commercial net­works, conubium sine manu (without the hand) became the norm. In theory, the wife remained under the patriapotestas of her father, but in practice that meant she enjoyed a high degree of autonomy within the marriage, controlling her property with an independence that became absolute upon her father's death, or earlier if he legally emancipated her. This maximized Roman citizens' capacity to increase the economic opportunities provided by their expanding empire by allowing both husband and wife to function as autonomous investors and managers of wealth.^[92]

While Roman citizenship was initially inherited, it could also be granted to individuals or groups by governmental action. In 212 ce, the emperor Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to virtually all the empire's non-slave inhabitants. With respect to marriage, property, and inheritance, this exten­sion of Roman citizenship removed a final barrier that had prevented, or at least limited economically advantageous, marriages between citizens and non-citizens. It also meant that all free residents of the empire now formed a legally endogamous entity, collectively defining and reproducing a universal state. In the fourth and fifth centuries, in conjunction with Christianization, several important changes were introduced with respect to marriage legisla­tion. The laws limiting the inheritance rights of single adults (the never- married) were rescinded, which had the effect of increasing the economic resources available to the celibate Christian clergy, including monks and nuns. Divorce, however, which had previously been a private matter that left both husband and wife free to dissolve their marriage bond for any cause, was now restricted to cases where a spouse had committed a serious criminal offense such as adultery, murder, or sorcery. In other respects, the social and legal changes associated with Christianity did not radically transform the Roman practice or ideology of marriage. Chaste monogamy, for instance, was a long-standing Roman ideal, whether in the lauding of the univira (the woman who married only once) or in allowing slaves with their owner's

The gendering of power in the family and the state permission to form a male-female non-marital but monogamous contuber­nium (“concubinage”).^[93]

The fragmentation of the Roman political order during the fifth to seventh centuries ce similarly fragmented the standardization of marriage practices and customs that had been achieved. Christianized Roman practices remained intact in Byzantium. In the provinces integrated into the Islamic caliphate during the seventh century ce, multiple endogamies defined by religion became the norm. Muslims married Muslims, under the marriage laws and customs defined by the Quran and Islamic law, just as Christians married Christians. As the political and economic situation of the caliphate stabilized under the Abbasids, more and more Christians (as well as Zoroastrians, in what had been the Sasanian Empire) converted to Islam and became endogamous with the Muslim conquerors to reap the benefits for themselves and their descendants of becoming fully incorporated into the vast network of the dar al-Islam.^[94] In the western provinces, Christianity endured and spread beyond the frontiers of the old Roman state, but did not impose marital uniformity. With the collapse of the universal Roman legal system in the West during the fifth century ce, a multitude of customs and practices emerged in the various Germanic and Celtic kingdoms, despite their nominally shared Christianity. In the areas that had been imperial provinces, however, two trends can be observed in the post-Roman period. First, elite Germans and Romans asserted their cultural distinctiveness (even if these identities were invented), and preserved it through a high degree of ethnic endogamy. Second, marriage sine manu disappeared, along with the decline in trade and manufacture in Western Europe. With wealth concen­trated in localized landholdings rather than a range of commercial and geographically disbursed investments, husbands resumed control over their wives' property and economic contributions to the household (as had hap­pened in Sparta after that city-state lost control of Messenia). As part of the consolidation of this new landed elite, the ethnic endogamy practiced by the post-conquest Romans was abandoned in most regions by the seventh century C e, and the former Roman elites intermarried into the lineages and ethnic identity of the conquerors (Franks, Anglo-Saxons, Goths, Lombards).

Urban elites in Italy and southern Gaul remained notable exceptions, preser­ving a Roman identity and endogamy under Roman law and marriage practices along with their economic links to Byzantium.^{[95] [96]}

Marriage, family, and inheritance in imperial China

In China, family and the inheritance of property evolved along with the waxing and waning of the patriarchal system as well as the composition of the ruling class. During the earliest archeologically documented Chinese dynasty, the Shang (c. 1600-1046 bce), the state maintained its dominance by actively expanding political alliances and fiercely conquering enemy tribal states. An important tool in forming political networks and consolidating territory was marriage. Shang kings took multiple wives, the majority of them from other tribal states. A major development during the Shang dynasty was the ascent of King Wu Ding (d. c. 1189 bce). To maintain and stabilize dynastic rule, King Wu Ding initiated the succession of kingship from father to son (instead of a brother or an uncle) and systematized ancestor worship. These royal decrees heralded the formation of the Lineage Law (zongfa) system, which privileged the eldest son of the principal wife in the inheritance of property (as well as political and economic power). Such arrangements matured during the Western Zhou dynasty (1046-771 bce), and dictated gender roles and relations throughout early China.¹¹ By the Han dynasty (206 bce-220 ce), Chinese society had become firmly patriar­chal, patrilineal, and patrilocal. Consequently, the practice of polygyny changed as well, from a man marrying multiple women to a man marrying one wife and multiple concubines who were legally married to the man but with lower status than that of a wife in the family. This change, started in the Western Zhou dynasty, was clearly intended to boost the position of the Main Line (dazong), or the eldest son of the principal wife.

While it was not strictly enforced, endogamy was nevertheless a dominant practice throughout pre-modern China, sometimes in the form of cross­cousin marriage, and more generally in the form of status-based endogamy. In Chinese tradition, marriage was understood as an ideal means of forming and consolidating political alliances and socio-economic networks. The Confucian classic, Book of Rites (Liji), a collective account of ancient Chinese perceptions of proper rules and etiquette compiled around the first century BCE, advocates that “the ceremony of marriage was intended to unite the goodness of two surnames, to secure the services in the ancestral temple, and to secure the continuance of the family line.” A marriage without a series of discussions among elder kin (usually the parents of the bride and the groom) through a go-between would be shunned by relatives and society, as Mencius (372-289 bce) put it.^[97] By prohibiting young men and women from seeking love on their own, such customs made sure that the spousal selection pool would be confined within the same economic ranking, social standing, or set of multi-generational intermarried clans.

The consolidation of patriarchy was due, in no small part, to the Han Empire's embrace of Confucianism. Under Confucianism, state and society were an extension of the hierarchical family, which functioned at its best when everyone acted properly in his/her position and assigned role. Furthermore, Han intellectuals relied on Confucianism to develop a very distinctive political ideal of sovereignty that centered on an exemplary emperor whose power was directly sanctioned by Heaven. The emperor, as the “Son of Heaven,” was the only agent capable of connecting heaven, earth, and humankind. And the Han Empire, under the rule of the Son of Heaven, held an absolute superiority over barbarians.^[98] It was with this ideological underpinning that the Han Empire set out to reinforce the Lineage Law system and the patriarchal structure that Confucius (551-479 bce) endorsed. During the Han dynasty, the Book of Rites, though not a legal code, provided the guidelines for rules of conduct governing individual and familial matters. Its so-called “seven grounds for men and three grounds for women” divorce rules would eventually be incorporated into the Tang Code, the first extent law code in East Asia, and kept intact in the law codes of all post-Tang Chinese dynasties, serving as the backbone of Chinese patriarchy. The Book of Rites stipulates:

There are seven grounds for repudiating a woman: disobedience to her parents-in-law, for this is against morality; barrenness, for this discontinues a lineage; adultery, for this brings disorder to a clan; jealousy, for this brings disorder to a household; severe illness, for this prevents her from participating in ancestor worship; talkativeness, for this causes disharmony among kinsmen; and stealing (for her own use), for this is against the principles (of family property).

While there was no recourse for a wife to initiate a divorce, mutual agree­ment to part was possible. Furthermore, a woman was protected from a divorce if she met one of the following three conditions: having no family to return to; having fulfilled three years of mourning duty for her parents- in-law; or marrying into a destitute family that became well off later on. Throughout the period of 1200 bce to 900 ce, no ritual or legal codes provided a woman with claims to inheritance. She might take some personal property with her when she married into her husband's household, but dowry as a common practice did not occur until after the Tang. In addition, bride price was often paid in symbolic gifts instead of actual monetary wealth.

The Lineage Law system would weaken during the Tang dynasty (618-907), and the period also witnessed the decreasing of patriarchal authority. This change resulted from a long period of interactions between China's imperial dynasties and powerful families of the neighboring regions to the west. For generations before Li Yuan (566-635), the founder of the Tang dynasty, the imperial clan had intermarried widely with non-Chinese tribes. Li Yuan's mother, for example, was from a prominent Turkish clan. The tradition of intermarriage continued for a few generations after Li Yuan. These non­Chinese tribes did not practice the Lineage Law system, nor did they have the ancestor worship ritual or law codes similar to those of the early Chinese dynasties. Raised by their non-Chinese mothers, early Tang rulers were not strict enforcers of the patriarchal tradition. As epitaphs from this period revealed, during the Tang, uxorilocal marriage was not uncommon, and married women consistently maintained strong ties with their natal families. Moreover, children born to concubines gained more claims in the family, especially after the Civil Service Examination began to provide men of less prestigious lineages or men born to concubines a path to acquire higher social and political status.

Spousal selections in the Tang era revolved around social and civic iden­tities. During the early Tang period, the so-called “seventeen eminent clans” formed the most powerful social and politic bloc in Tang politics, and they practiced exclusive intermarriages among themselves (thus, the spouses were often cousins). To counter these powerful clans, the Tang court adopted the civil service examination to recruit officials. Examination graduates or men with the potential for such success became much more desirable as potential

The gendering of power in the family and the state husbands, and were sometimes given preference over older brothers when it came to selecting the inheritor of the family line. A century into the dynasty, families began to list all sons as inheritors. Even though exclusive intermar­riages and the display of superiority of birth among the seventeen clans continued to the very end of the dynasty, as the civil service examination degree holders gradually became the core of the Tang ruling class, the practice of endogamy transformed to include the most successful examination graduates. It is worth noting that the majority of the examination graduates actually came from these clans, but many rose from the families of lower- ranking officials. For example, BoJuyi (772-846), the most prolific poet of the Tang dynasty and an Advanced Scholar (the highest degree), married a young woman from the Yang Clan of Hongnong. The Hongnong Yang was known to be one of the most sought-after clans among the seventeen. It is said that the highest goal of ambitious young men at the time was to “get the Advanced Scholar degree” and “marry a woman from the [top] five clans.”^[99] Even with the decline of the Lineage Law system in the Tang, however, the empire still was the most patriarchal society in East Asia.

The gendering of public power in the religious and political arenas

Expanding states and empires required soldiers, administrators, and judges to wield and defend public authority. All professional bureaucrats were men; women were largely or entirely excluded from these offices in every major pre-modern state and empire, however educated they were and however competent in household management. In monarchies, women could wield public power as the wives, mothers, and daughters of kings and emperors, and in some cases hold the royal title in their own name. Religious institu­tions also provided women with opportunities to perform public functions as officeholders. Women might also exercise public power informally as the wives and mothers of bureaucrats, as citizens, or by calling on alternative forms of moral or mystical authority that challenged the status quo. However, that women in low-status occupations such as barmaids, actresses, musicians, female prostitutes, and slaves were considered typical “public” women reinforced the idea that the model wife and mother should limit

her exercise of power to the authority she could and should wield at home over her household and children.^[100]

Women's role in promoting new religious networks is evident, for exam­ple, at the beginnings of Islam. Muhammad's wife Khadijah (d. 619 ce) was the first convert to the new religion, and women featured prominently among those first Muslims whose recollections of the words and deeds of the prophet (hadith) constituted a principal source, alongside the Quran itself, for defining Islamic law and religious practices. The Sufi mystical path also provided a public venue for women like Rabi'a al-Basri (717-801 ce) to promulgate their faith and quest for mystical union with God.^[101] In the competition between Brahmanism and Buddhism in South Asia, women were active both as patrons of religious institutions and as devotees. The early Buddhist nuns (sixth century bce) wrote poems, collected in the Therigatha, that publicly testified to the doctrines of their new religion; while the bhakti movement in classical Hinduism allowed both men and women to take up the life of a devotee who had rejected all worldly decorum and responsibility to publicly avow and perform their all-consuming love of the god Vishnu or Shiva.^[102]

The gendering of public power in the Mediterranean world

In the Greco-Roman world, women participated in civic religion as priests of cults and participants in processions, which articulated and reinforced the stable identity of the political community over time. In Athens the Pan- Athenaic festival brought male and female citizens together in a quadrennial celebration of the city-state's foundation, while the similarly quadrennial procession of Athenian citizen girls to the temple of Artemis at Brauron marked their entrance into puberty and the beginning of their transition from pre­adolescent virgin to producer of the next generation of Athenian citizens. Citizen women could also occupy public space to fulfill other ritual functions for their kin, such as gathering water from the city's fountains for bridal ceremonies or processing to cemeteries to honor the dead; but the day-to-day

The gendering of power in the family and the state preservation of the worldly welfare of the polis through the exercise of public office, casting ballots, and wielding weapons was restricted to men. Even the home had a man’s space (the andron) where men would meet their fellow male citizens for dinner and drinking parties with their wives and daughters kept out, female companionship being provided by slaves and foreign “public women” in the form of flute-girls and courtesans. Citizen men were encouraged to bond emotionally and intellectually with each other, including through male-male sexual relationships.^{[103] [104]}

Spartan women were renowned in Greece for their freedom and equality to men in education and physical training, but they too were excluded from public office. Sparta was a constitutional monarchy combining elective and appointed office with a hereditary dual-kingship; but even the women of the two royal families, including the wives of the kings, possessed no titles or official role as queens. Spartan women’s participation in public religious festivals included competing in foot races dedicated to Hera, but the principal civic purpose of their physical training was the production of healthy off­spring: Spartiate women who died in childbirth were publicly commemo­rated like Spartan men who died in battle. Spartan oral tradition likewise preserved sayings attributed to citizen women as models of how they verbally shamed their fathers, husbands, and sons to uphold Spartan military masculinity in defending the city and its values against foreign armies and influences. Like Athenian male citizens, Spartiate men openly sought bonds of pleasurable intimacy and spiritual companionship in same-sex relation­ships rather than with spouses.1⁹

At Rome, the community of Vestal Virgins maintaining the fire of Hestia in the forum embodied the continuity of the Roman state across all the transformations and exposure to external influences that came with state expansion and empire building. Roman mothers participated in many reli­gious observances, such as the winter festival dedicated to Bona Dea and the

March ι celebration of the Matronalia, which publicly upheld marriage and motherhood as the citizen woman's primary contribution to the state.^[105] Romans upheld model examples of republican-era matrons who had used their influence to press their husbands and sons to take actions in the public good. Livy (59 bce - 17 ce) provided several examples in his Ab urbe condita (the history of Rome since the city's founding), including Lucretia's suicide that drove her husband and father to overthrow the monarchy and establish the republic, as well as the case of Gaius Marcius Coriolanus whose mother Veturia and wife Volumnia persuaded this exiled patrician to cease his efforts to return to the city at the head of a foreign army. Many ancient authors likewise praised Cornelia (second century bce), mother of the revolutionary plebeian politicians Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, for the political advice she gave them and the pride she took in their careers. But Suetonius (69 - c. 122 ce) and Tacitus, historians of the early empire, criticized the ambitions of women like Augustus' wife Livia or Nero's mother Agrippina the Younger who used their positions in the imperial family to exercise political power to the detriment of the public good.^[106]

In the later empire, however, the imperial household became a formal branch of the government, alongside a division of the bureaucracy into separate civil and military branches. These changes, associated primarily with the emperor Diocletian (r. 284-305 ce) and designed to further increase the emperor's control over the administration of the state, had a substantial impact on the gendering of public power. Civil bureaucrats articulated definitions of masculinity that contrasted their emphasis on intellectual discipline and the arts of peaceful power with the military leadership's reliance on physical violence and brute force. Key positions in the imperial household were filled by eunuchs, whose castration had removed them from networks of familial reproduction and made them completely dependent on the emperor's patronage and support. While some argued that eunuchs were made greedy, vindictive, and emotionally volatile by their “unmanning,” others praised these courtiers for their loyal and single-minded focus on imperial service. In effect, two contrasting forms of public masculinity had emerged. One focused on the corporeal strength and training of the soldier's body, associated first with the army, then the Germanic elites of the post-Roman kingdoms, and finally with the warrior nobility of the European Middle Ages. The other emphasized the disciplined intelligence and dedi­cated spirit of the civil bureaucrat who subordinated the body to the mind, a model adopted by the Christian church to define the manliness (or virtus) of Christian priests and bishops, alongside the idea of monks and nuns as spiritual warriors fighting the enemies of God.^[107]

Both the formal integration of the imperial household into the govern­ment bureaucracy and the rise of a Christian ethos of civic service increased the public power wielded by empresses in late antiquity and the Byzantine period. Several imperial consorts played a prominent role in politics, such as Galla Placidia (392-450 ce) and Justinian's wife Theodora (500-548 ce). Irene, the first woman to rule as emperor (r. 797-802), came to power as the champion of icon veneration and religious orthodoxy in a coup against her son, for whom she had earlier served as regent. In the post-Roman Germanic kingdoms of Western Europe, queens were instrumental in partnering with members of the Roman clergy to spread Christianity among the Franks (where Clovis' Burgundian Christian queen worked in conjunction with the Gallo-Roman bishop Remigius to persuade her husband to adopt and impose the new religion in 496 ce) and Anglo-Saxons (where Aethelberht of Kent's Frankish wife Bertha helped pave the way for the conversion of that kingdom by Roman monks who arrived in 597 ce as missionaries sent by Pope Gregory I). Abbesses also played a public role in spreading the faith as missionaries and institution-builders for the Christian church, both in the former provinces of the Roman Empire and in regions like Germany and Ireland beyond the frontiers of the old Roman state.^[108]

The gendering of public power in imperial China

In China as well, priestesses and royal women were able to exert great influence in power and authority from time to time. As early as the Shang dynasty, royal women actively participated in court politics, military excur­sions, and religious ceremonies. Lady Hao (c. 1200 bce), King Wu Ding's wife, was a leading general of the Shang army in battles against several tribal states. She also served as Wu Ding's diviner and, like all Shang diviners, would in this capacity be recognized as a high-ranking court official who held sway in political decision making. Lady Hao is representative of the fact that Shang royal women were actively involved in the dynasty's power system.^[109] However, with the firm establishment of the patriarchal Lineage Law system, women's role in politics dramatically declined. Zhou sources, be it the Historical Records (Shiji), the Book of Songs, or archeological discoveries and bronze vessel inscriptions, do not point to any women who were equal players with men either at court or on the battlefield. If anything, the Historical Records, authored by Sima Qian (c. 145-86 bce), and Liu Xiang's The Biographies of Exemplary Women ascribed the fall of the Shang dynasty to the last king's indulgence of his consort DaJi, and the fall of the Western Zhou to King You's (r. 781-771) obsession with Baosi. Worse yet, King You made the fatal mistake of promoting Baosi, a secondary consort, to the position of Queen reserved only for the principal wife.

These narratives, however, also reflected a fear of the increased power that imperial consorts began to enjoy during the Han dynasty, when Sima Qian and Liu Xiang wrote their historical accounts. During the Han, principal imperial consorts were often selected from prominent families in the hope of cementing political connections and support for emperors. The marriage ties, in turn, brought consort families more power: emperors often rewarded a favorite consort by assigning her male relatives to important offices. Moreover, even in the heyday of the dynasty several Han emperors ascended to the throne at a young age, and in these cases the young emperor's mother (the empress dowager) would wield great influence in court affairs by forming a political clique with the official regent, who was often her own brother (the emperor's maternal uncle). One of the most powerful royal women in Chinese history, Lu Zhi (241 -180 bce), or Empress Dowager Lu, entirely cast aside the claims of her son, Emperor Hui, and dominated the

The gendering of power in the family and the state political scene for fifteen years until her death. The political influence of the consorts and their families grew even stronger during the Later Han dynasty (25-220 ce) when the majority of emperors ascended to the throne at very young ages (three of them at the age of one). When the young emperors grew older, they tended to resent the regents (and their empress-dowager mothers) and would often rely on eunuchs to curb the power of their maternal families. Thus, the history of the Later Han dynasty was marked by constant conflicts between eunuch factions and consort factions.

Imperial mothers in subsequent dynasties continued to wield political influence through the sway they had over their sons. Empress Wu (624-705) of the Tang dynasty, like Lu Zhi, went so far as to depose her sons, and ruled as the first emperor of her self-proclaimed “Zhou dynasty” from 690 to 705, after thirty years of co-rulership with her husband Emperor Gaozong (who had suffered a stroke in 660). While Empress Wu's rule was much vilified by Confucian historians, the period of 660-705 gave the empire an expanded territory, increased social mobility, and steady economic growth. Empress Wu's policies laid the ground for the prosperity of the High Tang era of the first half of the eighth century.^[110]

Buddhist and Daoist nuns, and, to a certain extent, courtesans, also played an important role in the public sphere during the Tang dynasty. However, since the Tang court was actively involved in regulating religious establish­ments, all powerful female religious leaders were connected, one way or another, to the imperial court: they were either imperial kin or endorsed by the emperors or empresses. For example, among 210 recorded Tang imperial princesses, eleven of them took a vow during early adulthood and lived as Daoist nuns until the end of their lives. The princesses' decision to lead a religious life was lauded by the court as a manifestation of their female virtue, as well as the imperial clan's moral prestige. Nevertheless, living independently in nunneries proved to be a great opportunity for some Daoist princesses to amass power and wealth. The fact that most of these princesses entered the monastic order after male court officials began expres­sing a strong resistance to royal women's interference in politics after the Empress Wu's reign suggests that the religious life increased in appeal for royal women when the exercise of public power as the wife or mother of an emperor became more difficult. The Daoist princess Yuzhen (690-762), for example, frequently attended music performances at the palace and was

included in routine imperial rites because of her religious office, which came with a sizable stipend: two-thirds of the harvest from 1,400 households. In her later years her estate was reportedly worth the assets of several hundred households. Yuzhen was able to translate her wealth and access at court into political influence by supporting various court factions and petitioning cases on behalf of officials and imperial relatives.

Compared to Daoist nuns, Buddhist nuns generally played a lesser public role. Nevertheless, they were far more influential than elite women who chose a domestic life. One such Buddhist nun was Master Ruyuan (700-775), who was born into the family of Li of Longxi, one of the most eminent lineages of the Tang clan. At the young age of ιι, Ruyuan received imperial permission to become a novice in a Buddhist convent, and became fully ordained ten years later. She was said to be widely respected for her intellect, knowledge, and her unyielding faith. She traveled, lectured, organized var­ious religious events, and had a large group of followers who worshiped her as their religious leader. During her later years, she was summoned by Emperor Daizong (r. 762-779) to lecture on Buddhist teachings for the imperial consorts and to preside over Buddhist ceremonies at the imperial palace. She was then appointed an Altar-Presiding Bhadanta of the capital Chang'an. “Altar-Presiding Bhadanta” had been an important title of honor and respect in the Buddhist tradition. However, in 765 ce Emperor Daizong issued an edict to set twenty such positions in Chang'an, ten monks and ten nuns, who would preside over all the Buddhist ordinations in the capital. A spiritual position was thus transformed into a regular governmental post. This practice of transforming spiritual responsibilities and honors into gov­ernment offices and titles became widespread and continued well into later imperial China. In addition, the emperor bestowed on Ruyuan the title of State Master, the highest position within the state-supervised Buddhist order. Among her disciples were both abbesses and abbots, another Altar-Presiding Bhadanta of the capital, and a sister of the emperor. Master Ruyuan's authority and influence demonstrate the important role Buddhist nuns played both in spiritual matters and in politics as officials of the state.^[111]

Conclusion

The formation and maintenance of states, empires, and trans-regional net­works in the ancient world has traditionally been viewed as primarily a masculine enterprise, contrasted with the feminine world of the household and domestic economy. Indeed, some scholars argue that the building of states and empires, along with the fostering of long-distance trade, contrib­uted to the reduction of the economic and political power women enjoyed in more localized village or tribal societies.^[112] Others have emphasized that women's subordination to male authority already existed in politically auton­omous, small-scale communities organized around a simple agricultural and/or pastoral economy.^[113] Still others focus on ways that trans-regional religious, economic, and political networks provided women as well as men with new opportunities for wealth creation, exercising power, building social relationships, and articulating a sense of self.^[114]

In this chapter, we adopt an approach that assumes neither net gain nor net loss for women (or men) as a consequence of the political and economic changes that many regions of the world experienced by becoming increas­ingly interconnected during the millennia between 1200 bce and 900 ce. This includes rejecting grand narratives that ascribe public political and economic agency in this period primarily (or exclusively) to men, with women confined to the household. The economic, social, religious, and political forms whose emergence and interaction characterize this period are of too great a variety to allow for simple conclusions about how these developments changed gender relations in the domestic, political, and spiri­tual arenas. What can be said is that individuals, communities, and societies experiencing political, economic, and cultural integration into trans-regional networks (whether that integration was self-initiated or imposed from the outside) faced a series of questions about the respective roles of men and women in that process. Should the range of what one considered to be acceptable marriage partners be maintained, expanded, or reduced? How could the wealth and autonomy of the household best be maintained in the face of powerful new economic and political forces? Should one understand the state as a household writ large, with the subordinate members of the polity subject to the parental authority and love of the ruling family? Or was the state a new institutional form, populated by people who, as citizens, served the common good even while as fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters they served the interests of their household? Could the interests of the state

SCOTT WBLLS AND PING YAO

and of the household be made compatible, and if so how? Did the granting of more citizen rights to men (husbands) than women (wives) play a role here? How people answered these questions and others was - and remains - central to the process of building, maintaining, and navigating the variety of political, economic, and cultural allegiances created by trans-regional integration.

Further Reading

Ager, Sheila, “The Power of Excess: Royal Incest and the Ptolemaic Dynasty,” Anthropologica 48 (2006): 165-86.

Ali, Kecia, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam, Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Barrett, Anthony A., Agrippina: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire, New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1996.

Campbell, Brian, “The Marriage of Soldiers under the Empire,” The Journal of Roman Studies 68 (1978): 153-66.

Cartledge, Paul, “Spartan Wives: Liberation or License?” in Michael Whitby (ed.), Sparta, New York: Routledge, 2002, pp. 131-60.

Cohn-Haft, Louis, “Divorce in Classical Athens,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 115 (1995): 1-14. Cooper, Kate, The Fall of the Roman Household, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

“A Father, a Daughter and a Procurator: Authority and Resistance in the Prison Memoir of Perpetua of Carthage,” Gender & History 23 (2011): 685-702.

Davidson, James, “Bodymaps: Sexing Space and Zoning Gender in Ancient Athens,” Gender & History 23 (2011): 597-614.

Courtesans & Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

Fleck, Robert K., and F. Andrew Hanssen, “‘Rulers Ruled by Women': An Economic Analysis of the Rise and Fall of Women's Rights in Ancient Sparta,” Economics of Governance 10 (2009): 221-45.

Guisso, R. W. L., “The Life and Times of the Empress Wu Tse-t'ien of the T'ang Dynasty,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Oxford, 1976.

Haland, Evy Johanne, “The Ritual Year of Athena: The Agricultural Cycle of the Olive, Girls' Rites of Passage, and Official Ideology,” Journal of Religious History 36 (2012): 256-84.

Herrin, Judith, Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium, Princeton University Press, 2004.

Hollum, Kenneth G., Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

James, Sharon L., and Sheila Dillon (eds.), A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, Malden, ma: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Kuefler, Mathew, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity, University of Chicago Press, 2001.

“The Marriage Revolution in Late Antiquity: The Theodosian Code and Later Roman Marriage Law,” Journal of Family History 32 (2007): 343-70.

Lerner, Gerda, The Creation of Patriarchy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Leyser, Conrad, and Kate Cooper, “The Gender of Grace: Impotence, Servitude, and Manliness in the Fifth Century West,” Gender & History 12 (2000): 536-51.

McCullough, William H., Japanese Marriage Institutions in the Heian Period, Cambridge, ma: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1967.

McMahon, Keith, Women Shall Not Rule: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China, Han to Liao, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013.

Pohl, Walter, “Gender and Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages,” in Leslie Brubaker and Julia M. H. Smith (eds.), Gender In the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300-900, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 23-43.

Pomeroy, Sarah B., Families in Classical and Hellenistic Greece: Representations and Realities, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Spartan Women, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Powell, Anton, “Dining Groups, Marriage, Homosexuality,” in Michael Whitby (ed.), Sparta, New York: Routledge, 2002, pp. 90-103.

Russell, Brigette Ford, “Wine, Women, and the Polis: Gender and the Formation of the City-State in Archaic Rome,” Greece and Rome 50 (2003): 77-84.

Saller, Richard P., Patriarchy, Property, and Death in the Roman Family, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Scheidel, Walter, “A Peculiar Institution? Greco-Roman Monogamy in Global Context,” History of the Family 14 (2009): 280-91.

Stevenson, Tom, “Women of Early Rome as Exempla in Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Book 1,” Classical World 104 (2011): 175-89.

Thapar, Romila, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Tougher, Shaun, “Social Transformation, Gender Transformation? The Court Eunuch, 300-900,” in Leslie Brubaker and Julia M. H. Smith (eds.), Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300-900, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 70-82.

Treggiari, Susan, Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

Twitchett, Denis C., and Michael Loewe, The Cambridge History of China, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986, vol. I.