武则天传记英文版.doc

EMPRESS WU THE GREAT FOREWORDS Not like in Europe where men stick to the principle of “Lady First” and where there have been many sovereign queens in the history, in ancient China, as a whole, the social status of women was low. They were not allowed to do what men were doing and not allowed to interfere with what men were doing, especially politically. They were deemed as ornaments in men’s life and as reproduction machines to bear offspring for the male families. Their sole duty was to obey men and please men. Although in some particular families, the husband might listen to the wife or might even be henpecked to the wife, yet it was not the main stream in the ancient Chinese society. It was an individual case. There was even such a tradition that when a woman did not bear any sons (daughters did not count) for the husband, the husband could divorce her for that very reason. The word “divorce” here was not accurately used. The actual situation was just that the husband could send the woman back to the family of her parents, where she had come from for the marriage. And the parents could not refuse to take their daughter back. Under such circumstances, it was not easy for a woman to climb all the way up successfully to the throne. Now let us go back to that period our heroine lived to see how she had become the sole female sovereign ever in the Chinese history. She was generally known as Empress Wu Zetian the Great. The low social status of women began much earlier before Tang Dynasty (AD 618—AD 907 ), in which she lived. It started almost at the beginning of Zhou Dynasty (1121 BC—476 BC). As far as I know, those foreign readers, who are familiar with Greek, Roman, Egyptian or Indian histories, may not know much of Chinese history. To give readers a general idea, I enumerate in the following list all the important dynasties in the Chinese history: Xia Dynasty (2207 BC—1766 BC) For this dynasty, some modern Chinese historians deny its existence because there