Passionate Women: Female Suicide in Late Imperial China

This is a collection of essays that focuses on the causes, meanings and significance of female suicides in Ming and Qing China. It revises earlier views of female self-destruction that had been shaped by the August Fourth Movement and anti-Confucian critiques of Chinese culture, and to consider the matter of female suicide in the wider context of more up to date scholarship on women and gender relations in late imperial China. The essays reveal the world of tension, conflicting demands and expectations, and a variety of means by which both and men made moral sense of their lives in late imperial China.