The Dragon Lady and the Cold War: Pearl S. Buck’s Liberal Feminism in Imperial Woman

In 1963, Pearl S. Buck was asked by the head of the eponymous publishing house, W. W. Norton, to write a blurb for The Feminine Mystique. The book had not yet been put through its first publication run; Betty Friedan was at that point an unknown writer. Buck wrote a glowing review of the book, saying that it cast a light on the "heart of the problem of the American woman."1 Friedan's critique, rebuking the popular post-World War II belief that women would find maximum personal fulfillment in domestic life, the rearing of children and daily chores, thrust Friedan into the national spotlight. Her text was subsequently hailed as one of the primary instigators of second-wave feminism.2

The publisher's instinct to tap Buck as reviewer was probably not owed merely to Buck's prestige as a writer who had garnered both a Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize due to the enormous success of The Good Earth. Towards the tail end of the Depression, Buck had published an essay on the plight of America's "gunpowder women," or the "white middle-class housewives who had been educated to blow up the American gender hierarchy yet remained dormant in their homes, discontent with their inability to pursue a life of fulfillment."3 Another essay on "America's medieval women" decried the fact that American women were the best-educated women in the world and yet, out of both societal prejudice and economic privilege, they did not put their educations to productive use in pursuing the fields of medicine, finance, and the arts. The essays, published in Harper's Magazine, brought Buck to the attention of organizations such as the National Women's Party (NWP), a women's movement founded in 1916 that pushed for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would abolish discrimination based on sex. The NWP's advocacy on behalf of women famously ignored issues of class and racial difference, most prominently showcased in their reluctance to allow African American women to join their ranks.

In 1939, at the end of the Depression era, Buck had seemingly forecasted the primary concerns of The Feminine Mystique. Chris Suh argues that Buck and Friedan shared prominent parallels in that both were proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment who "blame[d] American women for wasting their educational opportunities and advocate[d] similar visions of women's fulfillment... conflatin[g] the lives of white middle-class American women with the lives of all American women, ignoring the challenges faced by working-class white women and non-white women of all classes."4 However, Buck made her point in part through a provocative, seemingly racializing analogy ­­-- much to the disapproval of the NWP -- that American women were burdened with too much privilege, like the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty. American women had the distinction of education without the economic necessity of having to put it to use by laboring outside of the house; this made them "discontent with the fact that they could not use what they learned, discontent with the fact that they could not fulfill their vision of equality with men."5 Like the rulers of the Qing dynasty, who according to Buck's telling had fallen out of power due to "their life in pleasure," so too had American women been overly cossetted by leisure.6

In 1956, Buck penned a full-length novel, Imperial Woman, that extended the analogy between Manchu rulers and American women that she had started building in the 1930s. Buck's literary star had dimmed since the Depression-era publication of The Good Earth: the large-circulation magazines that had always paid her top rates no longer published her as frequently, and she was outright banned from publishing in Time magazine by founder Henry Luce on suspicion of Communist sympathies.7 Still, her political influence on liberalism and feminism continued to cast a long shadow, and Imperial Woman is a literary meditation on their entanglement. The novel is rooted in a startling set of parallels between the domestic and political economies of Qing China and the U.S. post-WWII. It depicts the life of the Empress Dowager Cixi, one of the last rulers of the Qing dynasty, and a model for the archetype of the "Dragon Lady."8 It follows Cixi from her life as a young girl who tended to all the taxing chores of her household, to her selection as an imperial concubine, to the coup she enacted that installed her as Empress Dowager, to her subsequent decades of rallying forms of nationalist resistance against Western imperialism in China.

This article triangulates the feminist thought of Pearl S. Buck as advanced in Imperial Women alongside the work of two much more well-known feminist thinkers of the 1950s and '60s: Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), which Buck had read in preparation for Imperial Woman, and Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique (1963). Buck portrays Cixi as not only preoccupied with larger affairs of state, but also consumed with diminutive affairs of the imperial household. I argue that by dramatizing the parallel of a luxurious confinement shared by Cixi and the suburban American housewife, Buck's novel partakes in a philosophical debate between Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir on what constitutes freedom, a debate that the latter summed up by asking, "What transcendence is possible for a woman locked up in a harem?"9

Though this analogy seems unlikely, it is enabled through a concrete political economy that connects the waning of dynastic China in the nineteenth century to the rise of American empire in the twentieth century. Written in the early Cold War era shortly after the creation of the Marshall Plan and free trade agreements that would ensure American expansionism throughout the world, Buck's novel returns to a prior moment in the history of free trade — the First Opium War, which forced open China's markets to the Western world — in order to interrogate the relationship between a politics of liberal feminism and a politics of free trade imperialism. In doing so, Buck provides a significant and overlooked argument against the entwinement of liberal feminist ideology with American empire and offers an early, if limited, example of anti-imperialist feminist critique that would attain fuller articulation in subsequent decades in the work of Third World feminists.

Imperial Woman 

The critical reception of Imperial Woman was enthusiastic.10 Film rights to the novel were snapped up by a production company in 1957, with aims of turning it into a large-scale musical directed by Stanley Donen and produced by Michael Todd.11 Elizabeth Taylor, who was married to Todd, was in talks to play the role of the Empress Dowager.12 However, plans for the production soon fell through: Buck had reportedly replied to Todd's bid for the film by snapping, "Elizabeth Taylor is not my Imperial Woman."13 The film was never made and the novel has fallen into both popular and critical obscurity. This essay constitutes the only academic article on Imperial Woman.

The novel is highly unusual in Buck's oeuvre as it is the only one that centers a historical figure. It also poses a significant divergence from The Good Earth's focus on rural peasant life. The times and the geopolitical connotations of her trusty subject material had changed. The Good Earth, which catapulted her to international acclaim, had rallied global consciousness against the predations of imperial Japan and painted Chinese peasants as superlatively sympathetic; now, in the 1950s, China was aligned with the Soviet Union and Japanese Americans were undergoing rehabilitation as model citizens.14 Communist rule in China during the 1950s was characterized by land reform movements that centered peasants. Returning to such material would have almost certainly been dangerous for Buck, who figured on Senator McCarthy's blacklist and who was formally investigated by the FBI in 1952 at the height of the Red Scare.15

Buck's choice of heroine was far from incidental. It is apparent from her biographies as well as her autobiographical work that Buck personally identified with Cixi while growing up as a child of foreign missionaries in Jiangsu Province during the long twilight of Cixi's reign. I relate this anecdote not for the purposes of promoting an autobiographical reading of Imperial Woman, but in order to anchor the central question of this article — how the anti-imperialist nationalism of a waning dynastic China comes to serve as a curious point of identification for a postwar American liberal feminism — within Buck's own life. In My Several Worlds, Buck's autobiography, Buck's own story is intercut with reminiscences about the Empress Dowager.16 During childhood, Buck experienced an intense feeling of kinship with Cixi, writing that "our ruler... was a proud old woman in Peking, the Empress Dowager, or as her own people called her, The Venerable Ancestor, and I supposed that she was my Venerable Ancestor too."17 The feeling of kinship underscored the young Buck's ambivalent relationship to her race. "I did not consider myself a white person in those days," she writes.18 Colleen Lye identified this feeling as the origin of Buck's "lens of exilic yearning," rooted in an "original trauma of racial self-recognition" when Buck and her family were forced to flee Nanjing during the 1927 workers' uprising in the city.19 As Buck describes Cixi in her autobiography:

She was the more fascinating to me because she had not been born a queen, but a commoner. Her father had been a small military official and the family was almost poor. She had worked hard as a child, the eldest daughter compelled to take care of younger children. Yet she had one advantage as a Manchu, and one that I had, too, as an American. Her feet were never bound as the Chinese then bound the feet of their girls, and she grew up with a free and imperious air. And then because she was born to power she moved toward it by the very strength of her own nature until she ruled the greatest kingdom in the world, The Middle Kingdom, which the West called China. It was a romantic success story and the Chinese admired the woman for it and forgave her many sins that she later committed even against them, and which in the end brought the walls of empire crashing down.20

Buck's identification with Cixi persisted long past childhood. Peter Conn writes that Buck "probably felt a sense of symbolic affiliation with Tz'u-hsi [Cixi]." The attraction lay in Cixi's extraordinary command of power:

Though it ended in tragedy for herself and her people, the Empress Dowager's life was also a story of female achievement on an unprecedented scale. Seldom had a woman risen so high, against such great odds, and endured so long. She dominated her nation and her times in a way that few women (or men, for that matter) have.21

Hilary Spurling cites a number of contemporaries who explicitly compared Buck to Cixi.22 "She imagined herself a queen, an empress," said one of the staff members of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which aimed to house and educate the mixed-race children of American soldiers stationed in Korea after WWII.23 At the fundraising balls for the foundation, whose donors included Dwight D. Eisenhower and Robert Kennedy, Buck showed off "elaborate jewels," a "white mink coat with... fox-fur trim and a Chrysler limousine with her monogram in silver on the door."24 The foundation was "an unlikely re-creation of the Manchu court, centering round a figure gifted, like the empress in [Imperial Woman], with innate authority, imagination, courage, ambition, and a tiger heart."25

These accounts suggest that the twinned characteristics that Buck cathected to in the figure of the Empress Dowager of China were her boundless female ambition and her access to luxury goods. In Imperial Woman, Buck merges elements of the Cinderella story with the trope of the angel of the house in order to portray Cixi as a girl who ascends into power and material luxury through her superlative command of domestic household tasks. This representational move erects an imaginative corollary between the conditions of luxurious confinement shared by Cixi in the late nineteenth century and the suburban American housewife of the mid-twentieth century. It allows us to unravel her critical stakes in the following questions: Who is the liberal economic female subject of ascendant U.S. empire in the postwar era? How does her relationship to consumer products implicate her in wider networks of trade, militarism, and imperialism? To what extent is she free or unfree as a result of these configurations?

In Buck's novel, the Empress Dowager Cixi serves as an exceptional locus for working out the relationship of the woman to the private household and to the public sphere, a line of inquiry that was immensely important to feminists of the second wave, who were negotiating the postwar demobilization of women back into the sphere of the home after their unprecedented waged employment during the war. Unexpected as this corollary may seem, Cixi embodies a critical duality: she experiences her gender as a prison and a form of powerlessness, and yet her gender is the means by which she comes to expand her regulatory domain and wield power on a national scale. This duality is lodged in Buck's retooling of the nineteenth century British literary tradition of the angel of the house into an implicit commentary on the plight of American housewives in the early Cold War. In Imperial Woman, the contradiction of the woman-managed household and the household as prison — the contradiction of the angel in the house and her dark double, the madwoman in the attic — finds an unexpected counterpart in the Qing Imperial Court.

Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, Pearl S. Buck and the Prison of Womanhood

Imperial Woman, like The Feminine Mystique, traffics in a number of metaphors about the divided or double nature of womanhood. Below, Friedan describes it in the following terms:

The split in the new image opens a different fissure -- the feminine woman, whose goodness includes the desires of the flesh, and the career woman, whose evil includes every desire of the separate self.

Friedan goes on to cite a woman whose description of her confinement to the household couches it in terms of a late Victorian or early twentieth century plight:

By noon I'm ready for a padded cell. Very little of what I've done has been really necessary or important... If the cage is now a modern plate-glass-and-broadloom ranch house or a convenient modern apartment, the situation is no less painful than when her grandmother sat over an embroidery hoop in her gilt-and-plush parlor and muttered angrily about women's rights.26

In 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar elaborated on Freidan's rhetoric of an essential dividedness by arguing in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination that the "necessary opposite" of the angel of the house is the "monster of the house," in which a "sewer of fury" seethed within an ostensible "temple."27 "As his wife," Jane Eyre reflects, she would be "always restrained... forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low ... though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital."28

The trope of the female condition as imprisonment predates Friedan as well as Gilbert and Gubar and appears in other feminist literature during the immediate postwar period. In preparation for writing Imperial Woman, Buck read a number of volumes concerning the status of women, in particular, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.29 Imperial Woman can be understood as a thought experiment partially in response to Beauvoir's formulations on the limits of female freedom. In The Prime of Life, written in 1960, Beauvoir gives an account of her disagreement with Sartre that formed the basis of her argument in The Ethics of Ambiguity (published in 1947, immediately before The Second Sex):

I maintained that, from the point of view of freedom, as Sartre defined it —not as a stoical resignation but as an active transcendence of the given — not every situation is equal: what transcendence is possible for a woman locked up in a harem?"30

This distinction formed the basis of Sartre and Beauvoir's oppositional concepts of freedom. Sartre, in Being and Nothingness (1943), argued for an "absolute" or intrinsic freedom which every human possesses, whereby a slave could be as free as his master, whereas Beauvoir argued that "oppression can permeate subjectivity to the point where consciousness itself becomes no more than a product of the oppressive situation... In such a such situation the oppressed become incapable of resistance, indeed incapable of the reflective distance necessary to be aware that they are oppressed."31 As such, Sartre's orientation is a form of "metaphysical voluntarism" whereas Beauvoir's is "a more materialist and historical understanding of agency, freedom, and subjectivity as importantly shaped by social structures."32

What degree of transcendence is possible for a woman locked up in a harem? For Buck, the historical figure of Cixi provides a limit case for testing the parameters of that question. The Cixi of Buck's novel follows a similar spiritual trajectory to the one that Gilbert and Gubar ascribe to Jane Eyre, in that the fierceness of her spirit is matched only by the extent of her solitude and imprisonment. Early on, Cixi exclaims to her fellow concubine, "Here is a prison! We are all in prison!"33 The course of the novel tracks Cixi as she defies her lowly status as a concubine imprisoned in a harem, proves herself a prodigious talent at court intrigue and goes on to rule China for over sixty years. Domestic discourse is the means through which Imperial Woman tackles Beauvoir's question of female transcendence.

Domestic Discourse in Imperial Woman  

 What is remarkable about Imperial Woman is just how much the Empress Dowager Cixi resembles Friedan's housewife from the early Cold War period: references to her excellent household management abound in the novel. At the novel's start, she herself is in charge of executing the menial tasks of domestic labor and as the novel progresses, she takes on a significantly more managerial role. In fact, the young Cixi's life of constant drudgery is such that her most profound thought upon entering the palace as a prospective concubine is that "I shall never wash clothes again, or fetch hot water, or grind meat. Is this not happiness?"34 Her initiation into palace life is not figured as personal ambition or an early indication of the historical Cixi's genius for political maneuvers but primarily to escape what she refers to as a life in which she is "no better than a bondmaid."35 Yet she is never relieved of the trappings of domestic life throughout her long reign at the palace. As Empress Dowager, she dictates long inventories of imperial household management with an attentiveness only possible for someone intimately familiar with that same labor. But here at the palace, the realm of the domestic is expanded to the realm of the empire:

... she thought beyond [her son] of the needs of all. She scanned the household bills, the records of food received as tribute, of foods bought, of silks and satins received and stored, and not one bolt of silk was taken from the storehouses without her private seal set to the order. She knew well how thievery within a palace spreads at last to all the nation, and she let every serving man and woman and every prince and minister feel the coldness of her watching eyes on him.36

The political model referenced here is that of the Confucian sage-king who leads by moral example and transforms the nation through his personal character. Self-cultivation serves as the grounds through which civil reform can be enacted and radiate out into the state.37 Her "watching eyes" are a reference to the bodhisattva Guanyin, frequently called upon by the Cixi of the novel for spiritual and moral guidance, also known "Guanyin of the Thousand Eyes" and whose eyes are often depicted half-closed in an expansive, meditative gaze.38 But there is a profoundly domestic dimension to her watchfulness that is leveraged as exemplary state leadership. In this passage, good housekeeping is both good bookkeeping and good national management. Distant though her subjects may be from her, Cixi maintains a more-than-symbolic affiliation with them through the material products of their labor: their agricultural produce, their bolts of cloth and silk, their curios and furniture and metal utensils. But the objects that pass through her hands also allow her to envision the scope of the world beyond the Chinese empire:

Silks by lots of a thousand bolts apiece, furs by bales from beyond the Siber River, curios from every nation in Europe and from the British Isles, tributes from Thibet and Turkestan, gifts from Korea and Japan and all those lesser nations who, though free, acknowledged that their guide and leader was the Son of Heaven, fine furniture and precious wares from southern provinces, jades and silver toys and boxes, vases of gold and germs from India and the southern seas, all these waited for her searching eyes and quick hands to judge their weights, shapes and textures.39

Buck's supervisory Cixi bears close resemblance to the ideal of the domestic woman as described by Nancy Armstrong. According to Armstrong, the formation of a liberal middle-class subjectivity in the nineteenth century was preceded by a domestic ideology propagated through conduct books and sentimental novels a century prior.40 The domestic woman was portrayed as the repository of society's best values and accorded a vast cultural authority predicated on her supervisory power. As Armstrong writes, "self-regulation became a form of labor that was superior to labor. Self-regulation alone gave a woman authority over the field of domestic objects and personnel where her supervision constituted a form of value in its own right and was therefore capable of enhancing the value of other people and things."41 This liberal rationale enacted an economic contract and concealed the terms of this transaction via the sexual contract. Buck's Cixi consolidates her position in the imperial household by turning sexual access and pleasure into regulatory power: first, she learns to withhold sexual access to her body in exchange for gifts from the Emperor in a manner that recalls imperial China's tribute system with surrounding nations; second, this method of withholding becomes the basis on which she attempts to repel the free trade concussions of the Opium Wars.

The Cixi of Buck's novel quickly develops a distaste for sexual congress with the Emperor soon after her ascension to the role of favored concubine. She comes to withhold her sexual favors in return for prized commodities, as exemplified in a passage concerning a rare ivory from one of the empire's tributary states:

This ivory came first to the imperial court as tribute from Borneo, centuries ago, and it was so rare that only emperors could wear the ivory in buttons and buckles and thumb rings and its scarlet sheath was used to cover their ceremonial belts. In the dynasty now ruling the princes of the imperial house still loved this ivory so well that no woman was allowed to wear it, wherefore Tzu Hsi [Cixi] longed for it and would have it. When the Emperor explained to her with patience that she could not have it, and how the princes would be angry if he yielded to her, she said she would have it nevertheless, and she withdrew herself for weeks until in despair he yielded, knowing how relentless and unchangeable she was where her will was concerned.42

As the hornbill ivory is reserved only for the emperor and for princes, Cixi's donning of the ivory transfers symbolic prestige, rendering her body not merely ornamental but a bearer of imperial power. Since the ivory comes from China's tributary states, the emperor, who gifts her with the ivory, takes on the role of tributary to Cixi, in an inversion of their sexual hierarchy.43 Cixi's method of refusal is couched in delay and denial. So long as she withholds access to her body, she is able to extort concessions by way of gifts from the emperor. She leverages this same tactic to arrogate more power during a pivotal moment in the immediate lead-up to the Second Opium War in which she counsels the emperor in a manner that replicates the means she had been using to deny him access to her body: "Delay, delay. Do not answer their pleadings, ignore their messages, refuse to receive their envoys. This gives us time. They will not attack us so long as there is hope we will renew the treaty. Therefore do not say yes or no."44 The emperor responds gratefully, "you are worth more to me than any man," implying that men lack feminine knowledge and do not understand how to utilize the tactics of delay and denial that women, as gatekeepers of sex, deploy in their gendered repertoire.45 As a result of this exchange, Cixi comes to sit concealed behind the throne of the emperor as not only his most cherished advisor but also de facto ruler.

The hornbill ivory's provenance in a tributary state invokes a gendered political economy that informs the sexual and economic contracts by which Cixi maintains her regulatory power. Under the Chinese tributary trade system, tributaries retained their own sovereignty but their rulers accepted the political and cultural hegemony of the Chinese emperor. Tributary trade consisted of a system that maintained and expanded relationships with neighboring states, in which states and their rulers ritually presented China with gifts and often received gifts of even greater value in return.46 The operant understanding of the tributary system in the 1940s as proposed by J.K. Fairbank was that the tribute system governed the entire world order of Chinese foreign relations until the nineteenth century, and that "whoever wished to enter into relations with China must do so as China's vassal, acknowledging the supremacy of the Chinese emperor and obeying his commands, thus ruling out all possibility of international intercourse on terms of equality."47 Crucially, the gendering of China as masculine in this formulation was flipped at the onset of the Opium Wars. Joyce A. Madancy suggests that at this time, China became the "overpowered female in this very unequal relationship, downtrodden by British imperial economics."48

In Imperial Woman, the terms of the sexual contract between Cixi and the emperor becomes the means whereby she regulates not just the objects that he provides to her — objects limited to the realm of the imperial household — but objects circulating within and beyond the realm of the empire, by way of commodities flowing in and out of China. The sexual contract conceals an economic contract in which she not only maintains regulatory control over the household, but the borders of the empire itself. The relationship between Cixi and the emperor, in which she compels him to act as tributary to her Dragon Emperor, and then uses the same means to encourage him to dispel the onslaught of free trade concessions, is anachronistic in that it suggests that she fails to apprehend the economic-political character of the age. The superior military capabilities of Western nations combined with their rapacious appetite for Chinese goods had made it such that it was no longer viable for China to treat all foreign nations as its subordinates or tributaries. Cixi's attachment to China's former economic trading model repels the imaginary of China as "overpowered female," harkening back to a vision of China as the seat of a tributary system in which the power it commanded genders it — and Cixi by proxy — as decisively male.

This near-limitless expansion of Cixi's regulatory power, along with Cixi's continual shedding of her gender over the course of the novel, appears to be Buck's creative corollary to Beauvoir's work on transcendence. According to Dorothy Kaufmann McCall, "Beauvoir argues the Levi-Straussian view that public and even social authority always belonged to men."49 Beauvoir articulates this view through the figuration of women as Mother or Goddess: "To say that woman was the Other is to say that a relationship of reciprocity between the sexes did not exist: whether Earth, Mother, or Goddess, she was never a peer for man; her power asserted itself beyond human rule: she was thus outside of this rule."50 In hunter-gatherer societies, Beauvoir argues, men constantly risked their lives in ways that demonstrated that they were creating values in ways that transcended the mere purpose of staying alive, such as in displays of technical prowess and shared values of hunting and killing. Women, on the other hand, were consigned to perpetual rounds of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and infant care that rendered them immanent, or bound to the biological purpose of maintaining the survival of the species, as opposed to transcendent. Women did not partake in the same violent struggle by which men claimed recognition from each other in risking their lives, and thus "superiority has been granted not to the sex that gives birth but to the one that kills."51 "Beauvoir insists that inequality between the sexes is first biological," McCall writes; however:

The invention of the birth control pill, in spite of its continuing problems, has enabled women to begin to separate heterosexual relations from childbearing. Once that binding link has been broken, the male's biological advantage no longer remains intact. In that sense, anatomy was a kind of destiny.52

Imperial Woman charts the course of Cixi transcending the concept of gender as she acquires ever greater power. Cixi bends her biological destiny — her ability to bear children — into political power vis-à-vis the act of producing a male heir to the throne and ruling in his stead as regent. Thus, in an ouroboros-like equation, she uses her body in order to obtain power, and that same power then becomes the means through which she is able to escape the prison of her gendered body and attain her cherished freedom. "What is a woman's body? It is only a thing, to be kept or given away," she laments at the beginning of the novel, to which her lover exhorts her, "You must find your freedom here within these walls, for there is no other freedom for you now... The higher you rise, the greater your freedom will be. Rise high, my love, the power is yours. Only an Empress can command."53 Initially described as commanding a "man's mind in a woman's body," at the end of the novel Cixi is a "being apart from men and beyond them all, as Buddha was."54 The singularity of her achievements render her singularly isolated: "Alone she stood above the earth, transcending womanhood, a height unknown before to any human being."55 The more powerful she becomes, the more she sheds the dictates of her gendered anatomy. Towards the end of the novel, her personal eunuch, whom Cixi been repulsed by in her sexually individuated youth, tenderly tells her, "There is none like you under Heaven... You are not male or female, Majesty, but more than either, greater than both."56 They share a private laugh underscored by a mutual recognition in the other: the two are both eunuchs, one literal and the other metaphorical.

Gender, Postwar Consumerism and Political Economy

What Buck appears to be engaging, a century after the events of this moment in the text — the Second Opium War began in 1856 and Imperial Woman was published in 1956 — are the changing contours of women's economic power via their regulation of the household, which at the midpoint of the twentieth century is largely inseparable from confinement to the (suburban) household. At the same time, suburban women's seeming isolation from the greater world concealed their implication in the growth of American empire in the postwar era via the cult of consumption and its reliance on free trade agreements.

Buck's depiction of Cixi as superlative domestic supervisor in charge of the regulation of household objects is strongly rooted in a Cold War discourse of domesticity. The onset of the Cold War meant that gender roles were drawn upon to distill national progress and civilization, with gender differentiation (or the lack thereof) serving as a sign of progress.57 Feminist historians have attributed part of the initial success of The Feminine Mystique as a backlash against the substantial prerogatives placed on women and domesticity during this period.58 The US upheld universal gender norms, promoting domesticity and consumerism for its women as a sign of its national superiority, whereas the USSR upheld the notion of women's equality to men, as measured by economic markers such as state protection of equal pay and the number of women employed in the workforce.59 In Nixon's ideology, the two potentially disruptive forces of women and workers could be dealt with via the ideal of suburban home ownership. Both blue-collar and white-collar workers could work to attain the middle-class ideal, which would decrease class consciousness among workers, whereas women could be placated with a wealth of household appliances that promised to ease their domestic labor. Guiding the desires of both men and women towards consumer acquisitiveness would quell the potential for social unrest.60

As Elaine Tyler May writes, appropriate forms of middle-class spending reflected morality and pragmatism, as opposed to opulence and luxury. Analogies were drawn between household spending and spending on a national scale: for example, a writer in a 1956 article for Fortune complains that "these young people who someday will run our capitalist economy - how do they run their own? Atrociously." Similarly, Buck's depiction of Cixi's stewardship of the imperial household economy as coincident with her ability to steward the national economy is symptomatic of wider discursive trends by which small-scale household economies were linked to a larger political economy. Though Freidan argues that the average housewife knows nothing of foreign affairs, the consumerism that she decries occurs within a Cold War context in which domestic household consumption was specifically leveraged as pro-American and anticommunist. In The Feminine Mystique, Freidan writes:

... the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house. In all the talk of femininity and women's role, one forgets that the real business of America is business. But the perpetuation of housewifery, the growth of the feminine mystique, makes sense (and dollars) when one realizes that women are the chief consumers of American business. Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives.61

In this passage, Friedan is close to transgressing what Daniel Horowitz calls her "[inability] to utter the word "capitalism."62 Horowitz writes that by the late forties, McCarthyism had a chilling effect on women's activism, withering middle-class support for trade unions, turning trade unions against female radicalism, and scaring rank and file members away from progressive causes.63 Friedan herself was one such victim of McCarthyism, having established a decade-long career as a labor journalist prior to her penning the book that would make her a household name: left-wing credentials that she sought to erase for the rest of her life, in part for fear that it might detract from the perceived legitimacy of her feminist advocacy. Horowitz argues that in fact, the central premise of Friedan's book — that women would only be free when they entered the paid work force — was an argument borrowed from Marx and Engels and stripped of its Marxist implications.64 In 1959, she had copied down a passage from Marx and Engels, which read in part: "The emancipation of women becomes possible only when women are enabled to take part in production on a large, social scale, and when domestic duties require their attention only to a minor degree."65

Household items — laundry machines, kitchen cabinets and stovetops, all the domestic accoutrements of a postwar middle-class America designed to captivate the reams of women mobilized into the workforce by the war and lure them into a complacent housewifery — played a significant role in what David Farber refers to as "growth liberalism."66 The 1948 Marshall Plan fractured the then-massive World Federation of Trade Unions (WTFU) and what remained of "Popular Front" coalition politics in the late 1940s. The initiative did not merely provide economic assistance by way of the transferal of recovery funds to postwar Europe: it was also a major stimulant to the U.S. economy in the establishment of markets for American goods. The Marshall Plan was the economic engine of a larger propaganda campaign that showcased consumer goods as a critical aspect of democracy, sponsoring exhibitions on days that coincided with socialist holidays and offering cheaper admission to East Germans. As a result, the head of the USSR's Department of Foreign Affairs called the Marshall Plan a program of "colonial subjugation" and participants at the first conference of the postwar Coninform decried the "illusion that there is some third possibility between freedom and imperialism."67

The empress-dowager-cum-ideal-housewife of Buck's novel thus moves in between the imaginative worlds of the late Qing court and the model midcentury American home constituted by the "household miracles [of the] electric washing machine, illuminated electric range, vacuum cleaner, mix master, toast master, etc."68 The tether between the two consists of the aftermath of the Opium Wars, which forcibly opened China to free trade with Western nations; and the aftermath of WWII, in which the expansion of American empire abroad necessitated free trade agreements and a military and diplomatic force capable of securing them. Prior to the war, the U.S. had no allies, and no U.S. troops were stationed on territory it did not directly control. By one count, in 1955, the U.S. commanded 450 bases in 36 countries.69 In the late 1960s, the U.S. had one million troops stationed abroad, far exceeding what Britain had at any one point.70 The Marshall Plan was the undisputed turning point from U.S. isolationism to global expansionism, "the economic and political foundation for the Western alliance that waged the Cold War."71 In the first two decades after World War II, international trade expanded at its most accelerated clip during the twentieth century, with the total volume of exports from non-communist countries growing by almost threefold from 1948 to 1968.72

Domestic discourse plays a significant role in the regulation of bodies and borders. Notable critics of imperialism and domesticity, including Anne McClintock and Ann Laura Stoler, have argued that the project of colonialism was not merely about the importation of middle-class sensibilities to the colonies but about the making of them: Western bourgeois norms developed against the immoral bodies of a "phantom colonized other."73 Imperial Woman accomplishes a rather different argumentative move. Instead of situating the body and the desires of the mid-twentieth century housewife against that of a racialized woman subject to Western colonialisms, it locates the contradictions of modern bourgeois femininity within the imagined experience of an exceptional female figure of late imperial China a century prior, and in doing so, provides a set of symptomatic analogies that serve as anticipatory grounds for an anti-imperialist feminism. According to Amy Kaplan, the "double movement" of domestic discourse in nineteenth-century America worked to "expand female influence beyond the home and the nation, and simul­taneously to contract woman's sphere to that of policing domestic boundaries against the threat of foreignness."74 Imperial Woman envisions a sphere of female influence that expands from the household to the reaches of a nation's borders, but firmly delimits the woman inside the walls of that same household. However, she faces a crucial quandary: her mastery of her household and thereby her power, that which allows her to be safe and prosper, depends on the mastery of foreign others.

The Imperialism of Liberal Feminism 

In Imperial Woman, Cixi is explicitly characterized as an avatar of anti-missionary and anti-foreign resistance.75 "Ah! That she would have been born a man! She herself would have led the Imperial Armies against the invaders," Cixi thinks to herself, during the events surrounding the start of the Second Opium War in 1856.76 For Cixi — famously known for executing her advisors who proposed Western reforms — the intrusion of foreign reforms into China is tantamount to the intrusion of foreigners themselves, which opens the realm up to further unequal terms, treaties and imperial domination. An advisor tells her that but for her, the actors behind the Hundred Days' Reform "could bring a new nation into being, a nation shaped and modeled on the West," to which Cixi violently interjects by crying "Railroad, I suppose, guns, navies, wars, armies, attacks on other peoples, the seizure of lands and goods... No, no - I will not see our realm destroyed!"77

However, Cixi's purported anti-imperialism is belied by her love of luxury objects and her simultaneous figuration as both Western domestic woman and Empress Dowager. The destruction of Yuanmingyuan or the Old Summer Palace during the Second Opium War captures the theoretical contradiction at the heart of this double figuration. The palace itself is described as a retreat that displays distinctively European as opposed to Chinese architectural motifs:

...a vast park threaded with lakes and rivers and crossed by marble bridges or bridges of ironwood, painted and carved by master workmen. Dearly indeed did Ch'ien Lung enjoy what he had done, so that when he heard that the King of France, then ruling, had also such pleasure gardens in that distant land, Ch'ien Lung inquired of French ministers and Jesuit priests what the French king had that he had not...78

Later in the novel, one of her advisors informs Cixi that the palace has captured and begins to recite the inventory of what has been destroyed:

"The mirrors, the watches, the clocks, the carved screens, the screens of carved ivory, the coral screens, the heaps of silk, the treasures in the storehouses - "

"Silence!" The voice of the Empress Mother came strange and strangled from behind the curtain.

"Majesty," Prince Kung persisted, "I saw a French soldier pay a looter a handful of small coins for a string of imperial pearls which next day he sold for thousands of silver dollars. Gold ornaments were burned as brass and the ebony which lined the Throne Hall -

"Silence!" the Empress Mother's voice rang out again.79

The loss of the Old Summer Palace, one of the most potent ongoing symbols of China's "century of humiliation," is curiously figured in the novel in terms of objects that constituted the trade deficit between China and Britain.80 In order to underscore the scale of the loss, Cixi's advisor's recitation takes on the cadence of poetry with fricative alliteration and inverted use of repetition: "the clocks, the carved screens, the screens of carved ivory, the coral screens." Due to precedents established during the Kangxi emperor's reign, private trade had come to overshadow tributary trade during the Qing empire and Sino-Western trade was dominated by a demand for Chinese luxury goods in the form of tea, silk, porcelain, furniture, lacquers and art.81 In between the emphasis on Yuanmingyuan as a distinctively European-inspired palace and the destroyed objects as those that constituted the trade deficit, a certain positional slippage occurs. In this scene, Cixi is not merely characterized as the Empress Dowager mourning the destruction of her nation, but also, provocatively, a Western bourgeois woman mourning an interrupted access to treasured chinoiserie and the loss of identity that portends. This chiasmatic figuration is historically viable: David Porter, Robert Markley and Chi-ming Yang argue that subjects in eighteenth-century English literature negotiated cosmopolitan self-awareness through repeated invocations of China via landscape design, decorative objects and tea-drinking.82 The household objects and rituals that shape and situate the domestic woman in Armstrong's account are imbricated within a global framework of commerce and trade, and by extension, so is she.

The passage quoted above contains a further reference to the impact of global trade on Chinese political economy. Cixi's advisor's invocation of a "handful of small coins for a string of imperial pearls which next day [the French soldier] sold for thousands of silver dollars" presents a stunning capsule history of Chinese currency in the two hundred years leading up to the catastrophe of the Opium Wars.83 Copper coins had served as the primary currency in China for over a thousand years until the eighteenth century, but the use of low value copper coins obstructed the evolution of a market economy. The Ming government issued paper money when Chinese copper mines were exhausted, but since more was issued than the market required, this led to deflation, the near disappearance of paper money from circulation, and the increasing importance of silver as a currency.84 Due to the scarcity of silver mines in China, most of China's silver came from Spanish America, concentrated in modern-day Bolivia and Mexico.85 When Chinese luxury trade with Western nations increased in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, causing a requirement for more silver, Spanish American silver production did not increase apace due to the exhaustion of silver mines as well as violence due to independence struggles. The shortage of silver led to the slow withdrawal of Europeans from trade with China, with the exception of Britain and the U.S. The British subsequently discovered that the Chinese were amenable to accepting opium in exchange for silver, which was available to the British due to their colonization of India. After opium became the "foundation stone of the British triangle trade between India, China and Britain," the First Opium War was started in retaliation to the imperial commissioner in Canton burning all the opium in European storehouses in 1839.86 The accelerated economic dislocation in China led to the expansion of Western accumulation via vast flows of silver into the world market, which paved the way for the financial dominance of Western nations in the following century, with "Europe ascending rapidly to the zenith of its power and East Asia descending just as rapidly to its nadir."87

For Marx, the Opium Wars served as one in a set of "chief moments of primitive accumulation" garnered by the "commercial war of the European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield," turning extraordinary stocks of wealth to European nations.88 More contemporary economic historians agree: according to Zhuang Guotu, the First Opium War "was one which displayed the global characteristics of the process of colonial expansion no matter whether it occurred in India, America or Africa: from commercial expansion to military conquest."89 Buck herself appears to have arrived at a similar understanding. In Imperial Woman, in an echo of her own anti-missionary stance, she writes, "And by now all knew that where the Christians first went, then traders and warships would soon follow."90 Buck was a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which in 1926 officially condemned imperialism as antithetical to lasting peace and launched a two-year campaign to battle the opium trade in Asia. As Mona L. Siegel describes, the WILPF struggled to articulate a distinctly feminist argument against opium trade in Asia that would have highlighted the suffering of Asian women due to the poverty and ill health caused by the trade and in doing so, create a truly global feminist movement.91 Rather, the Western feminists associated with the League focused on elevating their own credentials in social welfare, drawn from their historical backgrounds in Christian moral campaigns, portraying themselves as the equals of elite male policy makers. Ultimately, this meant that they were unable to connect their crusade against imperialism to the cause of feminism.

Imperial Woman, on the other hand, does just that. The double figuration of Cixi as simultaneously the Empress Dowager as well as a Western bourgeois woman is paradoxical: she cannot simultaneously be an anti-imperialist crusader as well as a liberal female consumer whose political power is premised on her management of household goods and objects derived from empire. This set of contradictory analogies unfolds the critical revelation that the consumerist habits of the domestic woman of mid-twentieth century America necessarily entail imperial expansion via the militarized trade deals that provide for them. This contradiction drives the central theorization that underlies the novel: that a feminism that is merely liberal is also necessarily imperialist. 

 The contradictions of liberal feminism continue to sharpen towards the very end of the novel. A mirage of liberal feminist exemplarity emerges only to be ruptured by anti-imperialist ire. An aging Cixi thinks of Queen Victoria, perhaps the only other woman alive to understand the weight of the throne, "wish[ing] that they two could meet and talk together of how to shape their two worlds to one."92 As Beauvoir writes, queens are the emblem of the replication of heteropatriarchal agency characterized by liberal feminism: "brilliantly show[ing] that a woman can raise herself as high as a man when, by an astonishing chance, a man's possibilities are granted to her."93 Cixi's fantasy of sisterly solidarity in this particular moment inexplicably ignores the glaring reality that British forces, marshalled under the power of the British throne, stormed and ransacked the seat of Cixi's own throne and forced her into a temporary exile. Scant few lines later, this reverie evaporates:

It was indeed her duty once again to find an heir, a child, for whom she must rule while she trained him to be Emperor. But this time she would let the Heir be taught what the world was. She would summon teachers from the West to teach him. Yes, she would let him have iron trains and ships of war and guns and cannon. He must learn to make Western war and then in his time, when she was gone, even as Victoria was gone, he in his age would do what she had failed to do. He would drive the enemy into the sea.94

The "iron trains and ships of war and cannon" in this passage refer to liberal reforms enacted by the historical Cixi towards the end of her reign. In a stark reversal of her initial resistance to modernity and liberal reforms, the aging Cixi initiated a set of infrastructural, democratic and gendered reforms around industries, railways, electricity, and parliamentary elections, and put an end to foot-binding as a cultural practice.95 U.S. newspapers took note of these progressive reforms, with one headline in 1904 proclaiming, "China's Woman Ruler Americanizing Her Empire."96 However, Buck portrays these same reforms as Cixi's attempt to resist the machinations of Western empires via anti-colonial nationalism. The tenor of these lines in her novel recalls her 1945 speech called "American Imperialism in the Making," in which she criticized the U.S. decision to support Britain in opposing independence for its colonies: "The great thing Russia has contributed to human history is an alternative to empire, empire such as Britain knows it in her colonial system, and empire as we are developing it through our industrial and economic monopolies."97

The world-warping force of these emerging "industrial and economic monopolies" undergirds Imperial Woman. Cixi and the suburban American housewife of the 1950s are linked by a shared devil's bargain between confinement and luxury facilitated by global economic networks. Both are insular and xenophobic yet dependent upon tributary privilege; both pride themselves on good housekeeping and yet their households are not closed economies. Crucially, they are connected by a political economic history that links the rise of one empire to the fall of another. As Andre Gunder Frank describes, the weakening of the Chinese empire in the beginning of the nineteenth century contributed significantly to the rise of Western hegemony in the twentieth century.98 Imperial Woman is canny to the fact that the expansion of female purchasing power in the mid-twentieth century, and the expansion of feminist autonomy that it inaugurated, is premised on unequal economic treaties and the destabilization of national sovereignty via forced entry into the world market. Similar sentiments are alive in her nonfictional writing as well. In Friend to Friend (1958), a book that was framed as a conversation with Carlos Romulo, president of the UN Security Council, Buck voices her agreement with a line she quotes from Lenin: "The way to Paris and London is through Calcutta and Peking."99 In an echo of the internationalist feminists who fought over the Marshall Plan, Buck argues that building the North Atlantic Trade Organization (NATO) after WWII was tantamount to building the infrastructure for communism in Asian countries by "[falling] back to old allies" and thus "immediately hedg[ing] and compromis[ing] with colonialism."100

Especially in the late seventies and onwards, Black, woman-of-color and Third World feminist movements began to criticize the racism and imperialism inherent within the ongoing discourse of liberal feminism, braiding into their analyses various critiques of capitalism and the expansion of American empire overseas.101 These critiques derived from waves of decolonization across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, in addition to the activities of left-wing and communist women in socialist countries such as Vietnam, China and North Korea.102 Though Buck extracts her critique from a much earlier set of historical events, Imperial Woman shares some of the critical concerns that characterize this branch of feminist critique, insofar as it has placed particular emphasis on the achievement of national self-determination as a means of overturning imperialist regimes.103

However, Buck is also necessarily excluded from this genealogy, in part due to the fact of her position as a bourgeois white woman. Prominent articulations of Third World feminism, such as Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua's anthology This Bridge Called My Back, attributed a portion of its originating impulse to the racism of white feminists and the location of their praxis specifically within their embodied experience of "visibility/invisibility as women of color."104 Chandra Mohanty likewise posited the difficulty of solidarity between Western feminists and women of the Third World, due to the "complex interactions between first and third world economies" and the "combined action of the military-industrial complex and the hegemonic cultural centers of the West... founded on monopoly and finance capital."105 Although Imperial Woman alleges Western feminist complicity in this same project via the cult of consumption, this problem is not one to which Buck supplies a thoroughgoing analysis or acknowledgement across her oeuvre or even in her own habits (i.e., Buck's personal performance of luxury and opulence appear at odds with the novel's politics). In Buck's life and work, this underlying tension stands unreconciled, capturing rather than resolving the antagonist energies at play in the acquisition and distribution of female power on a global scale.106

Though Buck cannot comfortably be said to belong within the feminist genealogy of Third World feminism, her novel does intuit a set of problematics that would be rigorously theorized in their works.107 Remarkably, Imperial Woman accomplishes the twinned tasks of anticipating the liberal feminist paradigm that would be advanced by Friedan, as well as identifying the global forms of economic oppression on which that same project rests. The novel's portrayal of a naked desire for luxury goods and boundless female power, paired with a disavowal of the networks of trade and militarism that enable them, result in a powerfully dissonant account of the libidinal energies at the heart of liberal feminism, as well an implicit argument for why such a project cannot be sustained across the intersections of race and class. The articulation of these ideas in the form of a historical novel allowed Buck's critiques of Western imperialism and global capitalist exploitation to escape prosecutorial scrutiny during what Charisse Burden-Stelly has named "the longue durée of McCarthyism."108 It offers an early, overlooked example of feminist theorization on domesticity, consumption, and feminist autonomy conditioned by militarized trade networks, or, the imperialist logics that underlie liberal feminism.

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Amanda Jennifer Su is Berkeley Lecturer in English at UC Berkeley. Her book project draws on English- and Chinese-language novels in order to demonstrate that during the Cold War, novelistic figurations of Chinese womanhood served as compelling but volatile proxies for debates over two competing feminist traditions: liberal feminism, broadly focused on the pursuit of individual rights and full legal equality with men, and socialist feminism, focused on the attainment of social and economic rights, such as rights to food, healthcare, and equal pay. Her criticism and fiction have been published in Guernica, Amerasia, the Journal of Asian American Studies, ASAP/J, and Breaking the Bronze Ceiling: Women, Memory and Public Space (Fordham University Press). 

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Banner Images from Smithsonian and Digital Commonwealth

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References