Teachers of the Inner Chambers

这本书最尖锐之处，在于它拒绝接受“古代中国女性=被压迫者”这一看似不容置疑的定论。高彦颐把目光投向明末江南的士绅才女——她们以闺塾师的身份走进千家万户，在教书育人的日常里，悄悄把儒家男权秩序留下的缝隙，改造成可以写作、结社、经营情感与名声的私人领地。她并不宣称才女获得了现代意义上的自由，而是追问：当“从属”具体落到某个阶层、某段血缘关系之上时，压迫与能动性之间究竟隔着怎样的灰度？这正是全书最具争议的地方：读者既会被才女们“穿过孔教妇德走到台前”的鲜活打动，也会质疑这种“修正”是否把阶级特权误读成了性别解放。它适合所有不愿用“压迫—反抗”的二元框架草率打发历史的人，也适合想理解“女性”这一身份本身如何被建构出来的读者。

Professor Ko’s research interest is the everyday lives of women in China –along with the domestic objects they made by hand–as a significant part of country’s cultural, economic and political development. She works at the intersections of anthropology, history, and women’s studies. Ko’s recent book, Cinderella Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding, published in 2005, shattered the popular conception of footbinding as a tool to oppress women and demonstrated that it was instead a source of female identity, purpose, pride, and power. It won the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association, Recently, she has been turning her attention to the skills of women’s artisans such as embroiderers, stone carvers, and ceramic artists. Her research during spring semester, 2004, as a senior fellow at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center’s Institute for International Research in Nanjing, focused on the importance of ancient art of silk-weaving for a study of the dress-making tradition and domestic work culture in China’s silk industry region. More recently, as a fellow at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, England, in spring 2007, she researched ancient swordsmith legends for insights into the relations between bodily investments and transformation of matter. In addition to Cinderella’s Sisters, Ko has written numerous books and publications, including “Between the Boudoir and the Global Market: Shen Shou, Embroidery and Modernity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Looking Modern (forthcoming), Every Step a Lotus (2001), and Teachers of the Inner Chambers (1994). She is also co-editor of Women and Confucian Cultures in Pre-modern China, Korea, and Japan. Ko’s courses include Chinese cultural history, body histories, women and culture in 17th century China, and Confucian cultures. Ko earned undergraduate and advanced degrees at Stanford University, including the doctorate. She has received a number of fellowships and awards. She was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (2000-2001), a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2000-2001) and a fellow at the Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers University (1999-2000). Before joining the Barnard faculty in 2001, Professor Ko taught at Rutgers University.