Merchants′ Daughters – Women, Commerce, and Regional Culture in South China

Helen F. Siu is a professor of anthropology at Yale University and honorary director of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong.

Merchants' Daughters turns conventional scholarship on its head by asking whether lineages, Confucian morality, and the cultural orientation of merchant families might have provided an unusual space for women's action in South China from the late Qing to the present. It paints an extraordinarily complex portrait of women's maneuvering among multiple layers of social life, from the local to the transnational. -- Susan Brownell, University of Missouri