Organizer: Vivienne Shue, Cornell University
Chair: Charlotte Ikels, Case Western Reserve University
Of Baskets and Steamed Buns: Family and Gender in Contemporary Rural Shandong
Birth Rituals
Kimberley Charlesworth Falk, University of Pittsburgh
Based on seventeen months of ethnographic research in rural Shandong between 1993 and 1995, this paper examines the power and authority of women and of patrilateral and matrilateral kin displayed in three birth rituals. These eighth, twelfth, and hundredth day rituals following childbirth are collectively called "sending grain" ceremonies, and differ from other birth and kinship rituals by their gender exclusivity: they are conducted for and by women. The authority and power of women is marked by differentiating ritual behavior based on age, kinship affiliation, and successful fertility. These occasions signify the collective fertility power of women, the transition of a woman into motherhood and adulthood, the authority of patrilateral kin and mother-in-law over the new mother and child, and the essential contribution of the new mother's natal kin whose daughter bore a child for another family's lineage. The circulation of steamed buns brought to the celebrations by the infant's matrilateral kin symbolize these domains of women and their families. Their redistribution during and following the feasts marks the solidification of commitment between two families connected through a birth, and the limitations of obligations between families and to the new mother and infant. Patrilateral kin's authority over the new mother and child is contested during these ceremonies via offhand remarks and excessive gift-giving by matrilateral kin, and by a new mother's noncompliance with postpartum restrictions mandated by her mother-in-law's instructions. I will analyze the differential meanings "sending grain" ceremonies hold for the new mother, her own mother and her mother-in-law.
Female Literature (Nüshu) and Women's Dilemma in Transforming
Identity
Fei-wen Liu, Syracuse University
The Confucian doctrine "Three Obedience" (or sancong) has been the long-held presupposition or foundation most research on Chinese gender system is based upon. Yet what is largely unquestioned is how this male-oriented doctrine is conceived by women and what is women's dilemma in transforming their conceptions of themselves, especially when faced with the identity-reconfiguration rite of passage, i.e., marriage. This paper is to address these inquiries by investigating women's wedding-related writing, sanzhaoshu, a genre of nüshu writing.
Nüshu, or "female literature," is written in the male-illegible centuries-old dialect-based nüzi, a female writing system used exclusively among peasant women in Jiangyong county, Hunan Province. Written in nüzi, sanzhaoshu, literally "third-day book," is a marriage congratulation letter presented to the bride on the third day of the wedding. This wedding-embedded letter is composed by the bride's natal female relations, but performed (or chanted) only by her affinal ones. Linking natality to affinity, sanzhaoshu becomes a place to negotiate the bride's dilemma in dislodging her natal past, mainly her status as a sister and as a daughter, and prepare her for a new, yet uncertain, affinal future. The main thrust of this paper is to examine how sanzhaoshu as literature reflects women's perspectives of the patriarchally-defined social roles and how sanzhaoshu as a mechanism serves to facilitate female contacts and thus help solve, if not escape, women's dilemma in transforming their status and identity from daughter/sister to daughter-in-law/wife.
China's Population Control and Its Impact on Newly Emerging Marriage Patterns in
Contemporary Rural China
Hong Zhang, Columbia University
Though controversial, the implementation of China's population control policy in the late seventies was largely successful in drastically reducing the number of children a couple could have. In the cities, the policy goal of one child per couple was quite successfully achieved by the early 1980s. And, in the countryside where peasant resistance was more formidable, the number of children was almost uniformly reduced to no more than two, if not to one per couple. Now almost two decades after their implementation, China's population policies have led to new demographic realities that are redefining traditional structures and strategies for marriage and family life at the local level. In the countryside, the desire for more children, preferably male children, is not just an ideological issue, but has strong bearing of the contemporary economic realities. More male children can not only provide the much needed labor force in the household, but also ensure old age support for the elderly. A drastic reduction in the number of children gives rise to a new demographic reality that is characterized by more single sex households and single child households, which means that those couples who have an only daughter or daughters will have to articulate new strategies and marriage arrangements to meet their need for family welfare and old age support. Based on intensive fieldwork and the collection of household and marriage data in a Hubei village between 1993-94, this paper discusses some new marriage patterns that begin to emerge in the 1990s. Special attention will be paid to what characterizes these new marriage patterns in terms of the newly-wed's post-marital residential arrangement and their obligations for parental support and in what ways these new marriage patterns represent an accommodation to the new social and demographic realities brought about by the national population control policies and the on-going economic reforms of the People's Republic of China.
"Save Money, Time, and Bother! Enjoy Family Harmony and Bigger
Harvests!" Marriage Law Propaganda in the Early Years of the PRC
Susan Glosser, Lewis & Clark College
Soon after the Chinese Communist Party came to power, the government promulgated its own version of the conjugal family ideal that had developed during the Republican era (1911-1949). From 1950 through 1953, the government published a variety of pamphlets and manuals popularizing the new marriage law. These materials, especially the illustrated "comic books" for barely literate peasants, permit us to explore the language and imagery of the Party's "new society." Because many people objected to the law's guarantee of the individual's right to marry as he or she chose, most pamphlets devoted themselves to mustering arguments in support of this statute. In doing so, they drew on a set of ideals that had been developed by and for urban intellectuals from the New Culture Movement through the end of the Republican era. The CCP strenuously differentiated the "revolutionary" love and marriage ideals of the peasant from those of the self-indulgent, city-dwelling "petite-bourgeoisie." In fact, however, the CCP ideal shared fundamental assumptions with its urban, capitalist predecessors about the nature of marriage and society, and the relation between the individual, family and nation. Through a discussion of the persistence of key assumptions in twentieth-century Chinese family ideals, the paper considers the continuities in the conception of state-society relations from the earliest days of the New Culture Movement through recent years of the Communist regime.