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THE LESSER LEARNING FOR WOMEN AND OTHER TEXTS FOR VIETNAMESE WOMEN: A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL AND COMPARATIVE STUDY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 July 2009
Abstract
Chinese conduct books for women were read throughout East Asia, but because Chinese was considered too difficult for women in Japan, Korea and Vietnam, vernacular editions often were prepared in order to make the message more accessible. In this article we present a bibliographic study of surviving conduct books for Vietnamese women, both in Chinese and in Vietnamese, and in manuscript and printed forms, and consider the production of such texts in the light of conduct literature for women produced in Korea and Japan. A particularly interesting case is Lesser learning for women, a hybrid book combining a Ming-dynasty didactic text in Chinese with other didactic materials in Vietnamese. For the most part, these various conduct books for women purvey unchanging moral certainties and restrictions for women, and as such were increasingly at odds with the changing world of colonial Vietnam in which educational opportunities for women were growing.
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