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Author: Lisa Tran
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442245905
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
This groundbreaking book analyzes marriage and family reform in twentieth-century China. Lisa Tran’s examination of changes in the perception of concubinage explores the subtle, yet very meaningful, shifts in the construction of monogamy in contemporary China. Equally important is her use of court cases to assess how these shifts affected legal and social practice. Tran argues that this dramatic story has often been overlooked, leading to the mistaken conclusion that concubinage remained largely unchanged or quietly disappeared in “modern” China. Customarily viewed as a minor wife because her “husband” was already married, a concubine found her legal status in question under a political order that came to be based on the principles of monogamy and equality. Yet although the custom of concubinage came under attack in the early twentieth century, the image of the concubine stirred public sympathy. How did lawmakers attack the practice without jeopardizing the interests of concubines? Conversely, how did jurists protect the interests of women without appearing to sanction concubinage? How law and society negotiated these conflicting interests dramatically altered existing views of monogamy and marriage and restructured gender and family relations. As the first in-depth study of the meaning and practice of monogamy and concubinage in modern China, this book makes an important contribution to our understanding of Chinese society and legal norms. In addition, by crossing the “1949 divide,” it compares the Guomindang’s designation of concubinage as adultery with the Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of it as bigamy, and draws out the legal implications for the practice of concubinage as well as for women who were concubines. Poised at the intersection of Chinese history, women’s history, and legal history, this book makes a unique and significant contribution to the scholarship in all three fields.
Author: Lisa Tran
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442245905
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245
Get Book Here
Book Description
This groundbreaking book analyzes marriage and family reform in twentieth-century China. Lisa Tran’s examination of changes in the perception of concubinage explores the subtle, yet very meaningful, shifts in the construction of monogamy in contemporary China. Equally important is her use of court cases to assess how these shifts affected legal and social practice. Tran argues that this dramatic story has often been overlooked, leading to the mistaken conclusion that concubinage remained largely unchanged or quietly disappeared in “modern” China. Customarily viewed as a minor wife because her “husband” was already married, a concubine found her legal status in question under a political order that came to be based on the principles of monogamy and equality. Yet although the custom of concubinage came under attack in the early twentieth century, the image of the concubine stirred public sympathy. How did lawmakers attack the practice without jeopardizing the interests of concubines? Conversely, how did jurists protect the interests of women without appearing to sanction concubinage? How law and society negotiated these conflicting interests dramatically altered existing views of monogamy and marriage and restructured gender and family relations. As the first in-depth study of the meaning and practice of monogamy and concubinage in modern China, this book makes an important contribution to our understanding of Chinese society and legal norms. In addition, by crossing the “1949 divide,” it compares the Guomindang’s designation of concubinage as adultery with the Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of it as bigamy, and draws out the legal implications for the practice of concubinage as well as for women who were concubines. Poised at the intersection of Chinese history, women’s history, and legal history, this book makes a unique and significant contribution to the scholarship in all three fields.
Author: Rebecca Holdorph
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1526739828
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
A surprising look at women who wielded power in medieval Europe, from queens to concubines to abbesses. Medieval society might expect the elite women who decorated its courts to play the role of Queen Guinevere, but many of these women had very different ideas. Great queens, who sometimes ruled in their own right, fought wars and forged empires. Noblewomen acted behind the scenes to change the course of politics. Far from cloistered off from the world, powerful abbesses played the role of kingmaker. And concubines had a role to play as well, both as political actors and as mothers of children who might change a country’s destiny. They experienced tremendous success and dramatic downfalls. This book tells the stories of women from across medieval Europe, from a Danish queen who waged political war to form a Scandinavian empire to a Tuscan countess who joined her troops on the battlefield. Whether they wielded power in battle, from a convent, or from a throne—or even in the bedchamber—these women were far from damsels in distress waiting for their knights in shining armor.
Author: Marten Stol
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1614512639
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 706
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Book Description
Women in the Ancient Near East offers a lucid account of the daily life of women in Mesopotamia from the third millennium BCE until the beginning of the Hellenistic period. The book systematically presents the lives of women emerging from the available cuneiform material and discusses modern scholarly opinion. Stol’s book is the first full-scale treatment of the history of women in the Ancient Near East.
Author: Eric Jones
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
ISBN: 1501758144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
Wives, Slaves, and Concubines argues that Dutch colonial practices and law created a new set of social and economic divisions in Batavia-Jakarta, modern-day Indonesia, to deal with difficult realities in Southeast Asia. Jones uses compelling stories from ordinary Asian women to explore the profound structural changes occurring at the end of the early colonial period—changes that helped birth the modern world order. Based on previously untapped criminal proceedings and testimonies by women who appeared before the Dutch East India Company's Court of Alderman, this fascinating study details the ways in which demographic and economic realities transformed the social and legal landscape of eighteenth-century Batavia-Jakarta. Southeast Asian women played an inordinately important role in the functioning of the early modern Asia Trade and in the short- and long-term operations of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Southeast Asia was a place where most individuals operated within an intricate web of multiple, fluid, situational, and reciprocal social relationships ranging from dependence to bondedness to slavery. The eighteenth century represents an important turning point: the relatively open and autonomous Asia Trade that prompted Columbus to set sail had begun to give way to an age of high imperialism and European economic hegemony. How did these changes affect life for ordinary women in early modern Dutch Asia, and how did the transformations wrought by Dutch colonialism alter their lives? The VOC created a legal division that favored members of mixed VOC families, those in which Asian women married men employed by the VOC. Thus, employment—not race—became the path to legal preference, a factor that disadvantaged the rest of the Asian women. In short, colonialism created a new underclass in Asia, one that had a particularly female cast. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, an increasingly operational dichotomy of slave and free supplanted an otherwise fluid system of reciprocal bondedness. The inherent divisions of this new system engendered social friction, especially as the emergent early modern economic order demanded new, tractable forms of labor. Dutch domestic law gave power to female elites in Dutch Asia, but it left the majority of women vulnerable to the more privileged on both sides of this legal divide. Slaves fled and violence erupted when traditional expectations of social mobility collided with new demands from the masters and the state.
Author: Anise K. Strong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107148758
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
From streetwalkers in the Roman Forum to imperial concubines, Roman prostitutes defined what it meant to be a 'bad girl'.
Author: Matthew Gordon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190622180
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
Concubines and Courtesans contains sixteen essays on enslaved and freed women across medieval and pre-modern Islamic social history. The essays consider questions of slavery, gender, social networking, cultural production, sexuality, Islamic family law, and religion in the shaping of Near Eastern and Islamic society over time.
Author: G. G. Rowley
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231530870
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
Japan in the early seventeenth century was a wild place. Serial killers stalked the streets of Kyoto at night, while noblemen and women mingled freely at the imperial palace, drinking saké and watching kabuki dancing in the presence of the emperor's principal consort. Among these noblewomen was an imperial concubine named Nakanoin Nakako, who in 1609 became embroiled in a sex scandal involving both courtiers and young women in the emperor's service. As punishment, Nakako was banished to an island in the Pacific Ocean, but she never reached her destination. Instead, she was shipwrecked and spent fourteen years in a remote village on the Izu Peninsula before she was finally allowed to return to Kyoto. In 1641, Nakako began a new adventure: she entered a convent and became a Buddhist nun. Recounting the remarkable story of this resilient woman and her war-torn world, G. G. Rowley investigates aristocratic family archives, village storehouses, and the records of imperial convents. She follows the banished concubine as she endures rural exile, receives an unexpected reprieve, and rediscovers herself as the abbess of a nunnery. While unraveling Nakako's unusual tale, Rowley also reveals the little-known lives of samurai women who sacrificed themselves on the fringes of the great battles that brought an end to more than a century of civil war. Written with keen insight and genuine affection, An Imperial Concubine's Tale tells the true story of a woman's extraordinary life in seventeenth-century Japan.
Author: Keith McMahon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442255021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
This volume completes Keith McMahon’s acclaimed history of imperial wives and royal polygamy in China. Avoiding the stereotype of the emperor’s plural wives as mere victims or playthings, the book considers empresses and concubines as full-fledged participants in palace life, whether as mothers, wives, or go-betweens in the emperor’s relations with others in the palace. Although restrictions on women’s participation in politics increased dramatically after Empress Wu in the Tang, the author follows the strong and active women, of both high and low rank, who continued to appear. They counseled emperors, ghostwrote for them, oversaw succession when they died, and dominated them when they were weak. They influenced the emperor’s relationships with other women and enhanced their aura and that of the royal house with their acts of artistic and religious patronage. Dynastic history ended in China when the prohibition that women should not rule was defied for the final time by Dowager Cixi, the last great monarch before China’s transformation into a republic.
Author: Emlyn Eisenach
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Marriage
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Emlyn Eisenach uses a wide range of sources, including the richly detailed and previously unexplored records of nearly two hundred marriage-related disputes from the bishop's court of Verona, to illuminate family and social relations in early modern northern Italy. Arguing against the common emphasis on the growth of law and government in this period, her study emphasizes the fluidity of the principles that governed marriage and its dissolution, and deepens our understanding of the patriarchal family and its complex relationship with gender and status during the sixteenth century. Peopled by characters from across the social spectrum of the city of Verona and its contado, Eisenach's study moves between stories about specific individuals--serving girls seeking honorable marriage through the unlikely route of concubinage, peasant men in search of independence from their fathers, and aristocratic wives seeking revenge against adulterous husbands--and broader analyses of social, economic, and geographical patterns of behavior. She shows how the Veronese at all social levels attempted to better their familial and personal fortunes by creatively molding wedding rituals to fit their particular circumstances, or engaging in the significant but until now little understood practices of concubinage, clandestine marriage, or informal marriage dissolution. Eisenach also evaluates the first half-century of religious reforms in Verona as the leading pre-Tridentine bishop Gian Matteo Giberti and his successors challenged common practices and understandings in sermons, treatises, confessionals, and court. Emphasizing the limitations of what the religious authorities could impose on the people, she explores how learned and popular notions of marriage, family, and gender shaped each other as they were put into action in the strategies of individual Veronese.
Author: Rubie S. Watson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520071247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
Until now our understanding of marriage in China has been based primarily on observations made during the twentieth century. The research of ten eminent scholars presented here provides a new vision of marriage in Chinese history, exploring the complex interplay between marriage and the social, political, economic, and gender inequalities that have so characterized Chinese society.
