gender structures and roles: Asia and the Pacific 485 Because marriages in most places were virilocal (meaning that the bride moved in with the groom’s family), husband and in-laws had an enormous impact on a woman’s life Marriages were traditionally arranged by parents in most cultures, as these unions were usually seen as bonds between families rather than individuals Prevailing customs and ideologies often exhorted women to be humble and make themselves amenable to their new circumstances In response, many women constructed what anthropologists have termed a “natal family” inside the usual patrilineal family Surrounded by potentially hostile strangers, a mother would encourage her children to feel sole loyalty toward her and often would teach them to regard their father as an outsider or even a prospective enemy The popularity of natal families helps explain the intense bond between mothers and sons seen in cultures as diverse as India, China, and Japan Women excluded from marriage found themselves on the margins of society Widows were sometimes considered a social problem In China they were sometimes called on to remain chaste Indian ideas were even more radical After the sixth century suttee (widow suicide) became more widespread Some widows would immolate themselves on their dead husband’s funeral pyre as an extravagant show of fidelity Religion could provide some women with an excuse to remain unmarried, as was the case with Buddhist nuns However, early medieval biographies of Chinese nuns show that devout thinkers found it difficult to reconcile female chastity with traditional ideas about the importance of marriage and procreation Prostitutes and courtesans represented a very different kind of unmarried woman Prostitution varied widely At its lowest level, it was degrading and barely allowed women to survive But some women trained as courtesans, distinguished by nonsexual skills In China many elite men turned to educated courtesans for companionship and entertainment not provided by marriage, and these relationships were sometimes extremely passionate Rising female literacy had a notable influence on gender relations in several regions, particularly in China and Japan Because of the Confucian emphasis on self-cultivation, some Chinese families of the educated gentry began to educate their daughters Women usually followed a curriculum similar to that of male students, although they rarely received schooling that was nearly as intense, since they were barred from taking the official examinations Some authors even began writing textbooks targeted specifically at female students, such as the Tang Dynasty (618–907) work Nü lunyu (Women’s Analects), which taught ideal female behavior based on Confucian principles In China women’s literacy had contradictory results Although it allowed women access to written knowledge, it also exposed them to highly conservative works that taught female humility and submission In Japan the results of female literacy were equally contradictory Women during the Heian Period (737–1185) were discouraged from writing in the prestigious foreign idiom of classical Chinese, which was considered inappropriately intellectual and manly, and were usually restricted to writing in their native language using Japanese script (kana) Ironically, this linguistic segregation doomed Japanese men to writing sterile prose in a difficult foreign language that they poorly understood, while women were free to employ their own vernacular to create some of the most important classics of Japanese literature, such as the 11th-century Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji) by Lady Murasaki Shikibu Generally speaking, many cultures viewed both masculinity and femininity as a life cycle consisting of progressive phases Social conditioning nudged an individual’s life trajectory toward conformity with this model However, some social roles challenged these ideals and were often hotly contested The ideal elite Chinese man would seek out a role in government and scholarship, but the chaos of the early medieval period made statecraft dangerous, and many talented men deliberately withdrew from the world to a life of quiet contemplation, decadent bohemianism, or hedonism The morality of this sort of self-proclaimed eremitism, or reclusiveness, became a subject of debate Similarly, the Buddhist renunciation of the world, often before marriage and procreation, was initially deplored by many Chinese scholars as a violation of basic family roles Shaving the head, seen as ritual self-mutilation, was denounced as ungrateful because it harmed the body given to a man by his parents Gender relations in the Pacific are difficult to study because no written documents from the era remain Nevertheless, given basic similarities in the customs of distant island peoples with common ancestors, it is possible to deduce the general outlines of earlier gender relations Classic studies in Melanesian ethnography, for example, stress the importance of male bonding and a deep sense of male psychological insecurity The most famous example of male bonding is the ritualized homosexuality of the Gebusi of Papua New Guinea, which deliberately created intense bonds between men of different generations while excluding women from a central social practice However, the most important factors in gender relations remained marriage and residence patterns, which varied considerably Couples in some societies lived with the husband’s relatives, while in others they resided with the wife’s kin There were even cases of multilocal residence, in which a couple would shift from one set of kin to another Of course, each of these basic social patterns produced extremely different forms of interaction between the sexes