"Intolerable Cruelty: Marriage, Law, and Society in Early Twentieth-Century China"
Intolerable Cruelty: Marriage, Law, and Society in Early Twentieth-Century China
Margaret Kuo
Rowman & Littlefield, 2012
Publisher’s Description:
At the outset of the Nanjing decade (1928–1937), a small group of Chinese legal elites worked to codify the terms that would bring the institutions of marriage and family into the modern world. Their deliberations produced the Republican Civil Code of 1929–1930, the first Chinese law code endowed with the principle of individual rights and gender equality. In the decades that followed, hundreds of thousands of women and men adopted the new marriage laws and brought myriad domestic grievances before the courts.
Intolerable Cruelty thoughtfully explores key issues in modern Chinese history, including state-society relations, social transformation, and gender relations in the context of the Republican Chinese experiment with liberal modernity. Investigating both the codification process and the subsequent implementation of the Code, Margaret Kuo deftly challenges arguments that discount Republican law as an elite pursuit that failed to exert much influence beyond modernized urban households. She reconsiders the dominant narratives of the 1930s and 1940s as “dark years” for Chinese women. Instead, she convincingly recasts the history of these years from the perspective of women who actively and successfully engaged the law to improve their lives.
Table of Contents:
Part I: Law and the State
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: GMD Legal Exceptionalism: Conceptual Underpinnings of the Republican Civil Code
Chapter 3: The Rise of Public Opinion: The Case of GMD Surname Legislation
Chapter 4: The Process of Civil Adjudication: Marital Justice and the Republican Civil Court System
Part II: Law and Society
Chapter 5: Spousal Abuse: Divorce Litigation and the Emergence of Rights Consciousness
Chapter 6: Running Away: Cohabitation Litigation and the Reconfiguration of Husband Patriarchy
Chapter 7: Bourgeois Affairs: Separation and Support Litigation and Injury to Reputation
Chapter 8: Natural Eunuchs: Husband Impotence Annulment Litigation and Legal Opportunism
Chapter 9: Conclusion
Author:
Margaret Kuo is associate professor in the Department of History at California State University, Long Beach and EDS-Stewart Fellow at the Center for the Pacific Rim, University of San Francisco.