Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century ChinaRejecting both popular image and accepted Western and Chinese scholarship on the status of women in premodern China, this pathbreaking work argues that literate gentrywomen in seventeenth century Jiangnan were far from being oppressed or silenced. The author reconstructs the social, emotional, and intellectual worlds of these women from the interstices between ideology, practice, and self perception.