That story of Liu Shi, a distinguished courtesan and poet-painter, is symbolic of the condition of women writers in past China, and the constraints imposed upon female talent in a society where men traditionally dominated the literary field.
This situation engendered a feeling of bitterness among many women, who were highly educated and felt limited in their ambitions to contribute to the literary world. "Despite what many people think, Chinese women from aristocratic families were as educated as their brothers,"explained Kang-i Sun Chang, compiler and editor of an anthology of women's poetry and professor of Chinese literature at Yale University.
