Review of Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan

Simone de Beauvoir once claimed that “one is not born to be, but becomes a woman.” This statement suggests that becoming a woman is not simply a biological or natural process, but rather a social, historical, and cultural construction. If de Beauvoir and all of us who have learned from her are right about womanhood, one must ask what it means to exist as a woman in various cultures at various times in history. How, for example, do Confucian cultures craft and “make” a woman or an ideal model of womanhood? This book provides intriguing glimpses of the ways contemporary scholars seek to comprehend and answer this question.