Dissertation Information for Margaret C. Kuo NAME: - Margaret C. Kuo
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2003)
ADVISORS: - Philip C.C. Huang - Kathryn Bernhardt
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Carole Pateman - Lynn A. Hunt
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: The handmaid of the revolution: Gender equality and the law of domestic relations in Republican China, 1912--1949
Abstract: To study the regulation of gender relations in Republican China is to confront the broad problem of how ideas and practices of equality (human equality in general, and legal and gender equality more specifically) transformed and did not transform a social and family structure that had long instituted one of the most hierarchical systems of human relationships. Of course, the lawmakers' attempt to restructure a system based upon rank, status, and ritualized distinctions between the superior and the inferior into one based upon individual rights and gender equality generated a great amount of tension and conflict. This dissertation aims to illuminate the tensions inherent in such a project at the level of both legal ideology, through analysis of the formal legal debates over gender equality, and at the level of everyday life, through analysis of archival case records of actual family conflicts and marital disputes.
The dissertation begins with the conceptual underpinnings and animating rationale of gender equality in the civil law codification debates of the 1920s. It illustrates the process by which legislators fundamentally reconceptualized legal definitions of personhood, marriage, and kinship and restructured marital, family, and property relations according to the principle of gender equality and their vision of modernity. Then the dissertation examines the conflicts that arose in the 1930s and 1940s when the legislative ideology of gender equality was subjected to popular debate with respect to surname usage and applied to the experience of litigation and adjudication over husband impotence, the cohabitation obligation, divorce on the grounds of cruelty, and alimony.
Litigants appealed to the new provisions for gender equality in ways not intended by legislators. Abstract notions of gender equality between a man and a woman, moreover, provided little guidance to judges who wrestled with the personal, moral, and economic considerations raised in actual disputes between husbands and wives. These findings raise questions about the ultimate desirability of gender equality envisioned for autonomous, rights-bearing individuals when Chinese women continued to be identified primarily by dependent family relationships.
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calculated 2008-08-13 10:42:45
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