1 A Ming-Qing Transition in Chinese Women’s History? The Perspective from Law

Abstract

This chapter challenges Western scholarship that sees the period of the Ming-Qing transition as a significant turning point in Chinese women's history, a time during which gender norms and relations underwent significant changes that were of benefit to women. Through an examination of changing laws on betrothal, marriage, divorce, and property, it demonstrates how codified law gradually absorbed ongoing peasant practices and expectations and the economic calculus on which those were based. From the perspective of law, the big transition in Chinese women's history occurred not between the Ming and the Qing, but between the Tang- Song and the Ming-Qing. And the process at work was not any bourgeoisification of gender norms and gender relations, as the proponents of the early modern approach would have it, but rather the peasantization of law that more firmly fixed a woman legally as the possession of her marital family. Keywords: Chinese women; Ming-Qing; Tang- Song