Book Review: The Kingdom of Women
Choo Waihong’s The Kingdom of Women: Life, Love and Death in China’s Hidden Mountains absolutely fascinated me, because it’s a sort of memoir/ethnography of the Mosuo people in Yunnan province, who are one of the last remaining matrilineal groups on Earth - and that matrilineal heritage is fast eroding as better roads, radios, and televisions bring the dominant attitudes of the rest of China into Mosuo homes.
However, the book is not about this erosion, but about the matrilineal culture as it still existed when Choo first visited the province. (She soon had a second home built there and began to visit often.) This is a society with no marriage: men and women both live in their mother’s home until the mother dies, and then the sisters found their own homes and their brothers continue to live with them.
People of both sexes can have as many lovers as they want; the men come to visit their female lover at her house. (All women receive their own room upon coming of age, to give them privacy for this.) Many people do eventually settle down to a stable relationship with a single axia, but the man continues to live in his matrilineal home and the children’s main male influences are their uncles, not their father, who may in any case be an axia who their mother dispensed with long ago.
And, because the basic building block of the family is the matriline, the Mosuo have none of the emphasis on female purity/virginity and total fidelity in marriage and accompanying male jealousy that bedevils patriarchal societies: there’s no need to ensure that the husband is the father, because there are no husbands and fathers don’t matter.
I found this all just about as delightful as Choo does, which makes me worry that we may both be gazing upon the Mosuo with rose-tinted glasses: any society has problems, surely. Although Choo does take up the question of whether Mosuo society devalues men the way that traditional Chinese society devalues women, and concludes that it doesn’t, certainly not to anything like the same extent; men don’t contribute to continuation of the matriline, but they as individuals are still valuable parts of it.
There were times when I wish that Choo went into more depth - I would have particularly liked to hear more about Mosuo attitudes on homosexuality, although I realize this may be a difficult topic to get info about. The one time Choo asks, her friends basically laugh the topic off, and there’s only so far you can push without getting rude, and after all they are her friends and not research subjects.
Aside from its intrinsic interest, I think this book is a fabulous jumping-off point for worldbuilding for a fantasy novel: it gives you the bones of how a matrilineal society can work, and you could build any number of different societal bodies off of that.
This entry was originally posted at http://osprey-archer.dreamwidth.org/577999.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
However, the book is not about this erosion, but about the matrilineal culture as it still existed when Choo first visited the province. (She soon had a second home built there and began to visit often.) This is a society with no marriage: men and women both live in their mother’s home until the mother dies, and then the sisters found their own homes and their brothers continue to live with them.
People of both sexes can have as many lovers as they want; the men come to visit their female lover at her house. (All women receive their own room upon coming of age, to give them privacy for this.) Many people do eventually settle down to a stable relationship with a single axia, but the man continues to live in his matrilineal home and the children’s main male influences are their uncles, not their father, who may in any case be an axia who their mother dispensed with long ago.
And, because the basic building block of the family is the matriline, the Mosuo have none of the emphasis on female purity/virginity and total fidelity in marriage and accompanying male jealousy that bedevils patriarchal societies: there’s no need to ensure that the husband is the father, because there are no husbands and fathers don’t matter.
I found this all just about as delightful as Choo does, which makes me worry that we may both be gazing upon the Mosuo with rose-tinted glasses: any society has problems, surely. Although Choo does take up the question of whether Mosuo society devalues men the way that traditional Chinese society devalues women, and concludes that it doesn’t, certainly not to anything like the same extent; men don’t contribute to continuation of the matriline, but they as individuals are still valuable parts of it.
There were times when I wish that Choo went into more depth - I would have particularly liked to hear more about Mosuo attitudes on homosexuality, although I realize this may be a difficult topic to get info about. The one time Choo asks, her friends basically laugh the topic off, and there’s only so far you can push without getting rude, and after all they are her friends and not research subjects.
Aside from its intrinsic interest, I think this book is a fabulous jumping-off point for worldbuilding for a fantasy novel: it gives you the bones of how a matrilineal society can work, and you could build any number of different societal bodies off of that.
This entry was originally posted at http://osprey-archer.dreamwidth.org/577999.html. Please comment there using OpenID.