New women willing to be concubines? Extramarital cohabitation, family politics, and state in modern China

ABSTRACT

By examining extramarital cohabitation in early twentieth-century China against intellectual, social, and legal contexts, this article shows the process by which the educated class, mass media, and state strived to understand and locate this new union against inherited traditions and emerging modern agendas. It especially focuses on the controversy and confusion between the new women involved in these unions and concubines whose presence caused social anxiety in newly emerged gender relations and modern state governance. This article argues that the very actively negotiating process among the historical actors thickened rather than clarified the ambiguous controversy over extramarital cohabitation and the men and women involved in these unions. To a larger extent, by unfolding the process of awkward accommodation and incompatibility of foreign ideas of sex, love, and marriage into existing social and institutional milieu for significance, this article also reveals the tensions between family and state and between idea and reality during the transformation of modern China. The society deeply infiltrated by previously established social, moral, and legal structures had to respond to and accommodate external ideas, practices, lifestyles, and values. Failure accompanied success, and uncoupling did recoupling. It was within the dynamics of all these processes that Chinese society transformed.

KEYWORDS:

• Extramarital cohabitation
• concubinage
• the new women
• transformation of modern China

Acknowledgements

I truly appreciate the thoughtful and critical suggestions from the three anonymous reviewers of the History of the Family and I am also thankful to the insights that my colleagues have provided during the course of the writing and revision of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Interestingly, when this book was translated and published in Chinese, the sentence ‘even though I had another wife at the time’ was deleted. See Shu (Schwarcz), Zhang Shenfu fangtanlu (Interview with Zhang Shenfu), translated by Shaoming Li, Beijing: Beijing tushuguan chubanshe, 2001, p. 72.

2. These intellectuals include Lu Xun (1881–1936) and Xu Guangping (1898–1968), Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) and Gao Junman (1889–1931), Yu Dafu (1896–1945) and Wang Yingxia (1908–2000), Guo Moruo (1892–1978) and Yu Liqun (1916–1979), and many less-known ones like Wu Shaozeng and Miss Yan.