Leigh Victoria Phan, MS, MFA

Empowering Women in Classical China

Around 190 CE China, it was common for girls’ personal names to be unrecorded by history. Instead, all we have left is to know them by their family names. One such woman born in this era was Lady Sun, but she didn’t let society stop her from trampling over gender norms with her one hundred armed female soldiers. This kind of female empowerment and early feminism is a rare find in this time period. A unit of female guards, all armed with swords and other weapons, was positively unheard of in the Han Dynasty, but when China split into three separate kingdoms, things like gender norms became a little more relaxed.