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Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China
This book is a study of polyandry, wife-selling, and a variety of related practices in China during the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). By analyzing over 1200 legal cases from local and central court archives, Matthew Sommer explores the functions played by marriage, sex, and reproduction in the survival strategies of the rural poor under conditions of overpopulation, worsening sex ratios, and shrinking farm sizes. Polyandry and wife-selling represented opposite ends of a spectrum of strategies. At one end, polyandry was a means to keep the family together by expanding it. A woman would bring in a second husband in exchange for his help supporting her family. In contrast, wife sale was a means to survive by breaking up a family: a husband would secure an emergency infusion of cash while his wife would escape poverty and secure a fresh start with another man.
Even though Qing law prohibited both practices under the rubric “illicit sexual relations,” Sommer shows how magistrates charged with propagating and enforcing a fundamentalist Confucian vision of female chastity tried to cope with their social reality in the face of daunting poverty. This contradiction illuminates both the pragmatism of routine adjudication and the increasingly dysfunctional nature of the dynastic state in the face of mounting social crisis. By casting a spotlight on the rural poor and the experiences of both men and women, Sommer provides an alternative to the standard paradigms of women’s history that have long dominated scholarship on gender and sexuality in late imperial China.
Even though Qing law prohibited both practices under the rubric “illicit sexual relations,” Sommer shows how magistrates charged with propagating and enforcing a fundamentalist Confucian vision of female chastity tried to cope with their social reality in the face of daunting poverty. This contradiction illuminates both the pragmatism of routine adjudication and the increasingly dysfunctional nature of the dynastic state in the face of mounting social crisis. By casting a spotlight on the rural poor and the experiences of both men and women, Sommer provides an alternative to the standard paradigms of women’s history that have long dominated scholarship on gender and sexuality in late imperial China.
492 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 10, 2018
This book's primary sources are absolutely whack, if I may use a slang term to describe an impressive work of scholarship.
Sommer traces the nuances in the power dynamics between husband and wife; society and the individual; lineage and the household; law and reality in the Chinese countryside during the Qing Dynasty where the sex ratio was around 5 men for every women. This is a book that handles comically tragic sources and experiences with maturity and it emerges with a story of agency for the often victimized women of the Qing Dynasty. This book is a gender history, a legal history, a social history and the writing is structured in such a clear way that the reader is guided through these layers of themes and analysis.
Beyond the subject matter of polyandry and wife-selling among the rural poor in the Qing Dynasty, this book is a clear model for anyone looking to understand the practice of writing any sorts of gender, social and legal histories. Popular readers can still find an engaging read about humans acting as humans would in a society so radically different than what we are used to today.
Sommer traces the nuances in the power dynamics between husband and wife; society and the individual; lineage and the household; law and reality in the Chinese countryside during the Qing Dynasty where the sex ratio was around 5 men for every women. This is a book that handles comically tragic sources and experiences with maturity and it emerges with a story of agency for the often victimized women of the Qing Dynasty. This book is a gender history, a legal history, a social history and the writing is structured in such a clear way that the reader is guided through these layers of themes and analysis.
Beyond the subject matter of polyandry and wife-selling among the rural poor in the Qing Dynasty, this book is a clear model for anyone looking to understand the practice of writing any sorts of gender, social and legal histories. Popular readers can still find an engaging read about humans acting as humans would in a society so radically different than what we are used to today.
May 31, 2021
砍一些案件Conclusion再长一点，把话说清楚就更好了（criminalization of poverty就提了一句）。
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October 30, 20241 一妻多夫制與「兄弟」
2 買妻與買地的同構性：the shared contract form and vocabulary, and supplementary payments
3 妻子以不合作行為違反道德性義務，以促使被賣出
2 買妻與買地的同構性：the shared contract form and vocabulary, and supplementary payments
3 妻子以不合作行為違反道德性義務，以促使被賣出
February 3, 2017
A great book and an awesome follow up to his earlier work. This is an astonishingly well-researched social history that is essential reading for anyone interested in late Qing social and legal history, and/or the history of sexuality in China. In this book, Sommer explores polyandry and wife-selling in rural later Qing China through over 1,600 individual case studies encompassing well over 4,000 ordinary people's lives. There is a lot of juiciness in here and a detailed analysis of this phenomenon spread across a large geographical space and a good chunk of time.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews