Intolerable Cruelty: Marriage, Law, and Society in Early Twentieth-Century China by Margaret Kuo

Abstract

Reviewed by: Intolerable Cruelty: Marriage, Law, and Society in Early Twentieth-Century China by Margaret Kuo Xiaoqun Xu Kuo, Margaret. Intolerable Cruelty: Marriage, Law, and Society in Early Twentieth-Century China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. xiii, 250 pp. $75.00 (cloth). One of the recent additions to a growing body of scholarship on legal-judicial history of Republican China, Margaret Kuo’s book integrates legal history and women’s history through examining how the Civil Code of 1929–30 offered Chinese women new ways to advance their personal rights and interests in matters of marriage and family. As such, the book makes important contributions to both fields. Intolerable Cruelty is organized in two parts. Part I lays out political, intellectual, and social backgrounds for the making of the civil code in early twentieth-century China and describes the institutional settings in which civil lawsuits involving marital disputes were mediated and adjudicated. After the Introduction, Chapter 2 addresses conceptual underpinnings of the 1930 Civil Code. Chapter 3 discusses the 1930s legislation and debates (in the legislature and the print media, especially women’s journals) on married women’s use of their own surnames. Chapter 4 describes the court system by following a marital dispute case in the mid-1940s from the district court to the provincial superior court and finally to the supreme court. Kuo emphasizes that the promulgation of the Civil Code in 1929–30 marked the formal separation of civil justice and criminal justice. The code represented an embracing of liberal modernity, especially the new conceptions of marriage and family based on a conjugal unit, instead of the patrilineal family, and on individual rights and gender equality, instead of Confucian kinship obligations and gender inequality. At the same time, in the Civil Code the individual’s rights were not absolute but qualified by social/national interests, which was promoted by GMD lawmakers as the most advanced intellectual trend in legal theories from the West. “It is through this notion of social solidarity or the social/national interest that GMD legislators intended to transcend the individual interest of Western law, the class interest of Soviet law, and the lineage-family interest of traditional Chinese law,” Kuo writes (p. 46). In these chapters the author is effective in elucidating the significance of the Civil Code and the conceptual shifts behind it and the legal outcomes from it. A minor quibble here is that the term “legal exceptionalism”—“positing the Republican Civil Code as an important exception to the GMD’s otherwise authoritarian nature” (p. 9)—is unnecessary. The term assumes that it would be mutually exclusive for a regime to be authoritarian and to accept gender equality intellectually and legally (based on the rights concept), so that the latter needs to be an exception to the former to exist. The book actually proves the assumption is not valid. In other words, no apologies are needed for pointing out that the GMD party-state did advocate (and even practice) gender equality. Advances in gender equality did not only happen in marital relations under the Civil Code; women were, for instance, allowed to enter the legal profession in 1927, and recruited into police forces starting in 1929, both for the first time in Chinese history. Part II contains four chapters and the conclusion. Each chapter covers one type of legal remedy sought in marital dispute cases: divorce, cohabitation, separation, and annulment. Chapter 5, on divorce, shows that married women were able to sue for divorce on the grounds of being abused, because the Civil Code provided legal language, which lawyers would use to help such women to formulate their mundane grievances into legally actionable claims, such as suffering from “intolerable cruelty” at the hands of husbands and in-laws. As Kuo notes, both the agency of women and the role of lawyers who actualized said agency were crucial here. One would agree with Kuo: “The interaction between Republican lawyers and their women clients is an interesting question that requires additional research” (p. 136, note 9). Chapter 6 examines cases where husbands asked the court to order their runaway wives to return and live with them. Under the Civil Code...