Women in Tibet – Janet Gyatso; Hanna Havnevik

Among the most neglected topics in scholarship on Tibetan Buddhism has been the place of women in the texts, its practices and its institutions. This rich volume represents an important contribution to knowledge of women in Tibet in the pre-modern and modern periods, and a signpost for new directions of research and reflection.’-Donald S. Lopez, Jr, Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies, University of Michigan
Women in Tibet goes beyond the popular stereotypes of women, Tibet, and Buddhism. It breaks new ground in exploring the continuities in the lives and experiences of Tibetan women.’-Professor Ronald Schwartz, author of Circle of Protest: Political Ritual in the Tibetan Uprising (1994)
This specially commissioned volume explores the struggles and accomplishments of women from both past and present-day Tibet. Here are queens from the imperial period, yoginis and religious teachers of medieval times, Buddhist nuns, oracles, political workers, medical doctors, and performing artists. Most of the chapters focus on the lives of individual women, whether from textual sources or from anthropological data, and show that Tibetan women have found ways to assume leadership roles and to explore educational opportunities in a variety of contexts.
The book is innovative in resisting both romanticization and hypercriticism of women’s status in Tibetan society, attending rather to historical description and to the questions of what is distinctive about their situations in Tibet, and what is common to both men and women in Tibetan society.
Janet Gyatso is Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies at the Divinity School, Harvard University. Her books include Apparitions of the Self: the Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary (Princeton University Press, 1998). Hanna Havnevik is Associate Professor at the Department of Culture Studies, University of Oslo. She is the author of Tibetan Buddhist Nuns: History, Cultural Norms and Social Reality (Universitetsforlaget, 1989).