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Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China - Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions (Hardcover)
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Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China - Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions (Hardcover)
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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.
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