Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing, 1937–1949 by Zhao Ma (review)

Zhao Ma Opens Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing with the oft-quoted words of historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: "Well-behaved [End Page E-28] women seldom make history." Though Ulrich's statement has been so intensely merchandised as to become trite (Ma spotted it on a bumper sticker), historians seeking to write history "from the bottom up" know it nevertheless carries more than a ring of truth. Well-behaved women—especially well-behaved poor and illiterate women—seldom make it into the archives; they rarely leave behind a documentary trail that would enable us to integrate their stories into historical narratives. The stories that are captured are of ill-behaved women, those who have somehow transgressed the rules of society or the state and thus been written about in newspapers and court documents. Though their cases may be few in number and not representative of women's experiences across the whole of a given society, these unruly women have left behind archival traces that enable us to "make history" as best we can.

Ma trains his eye on the unruly lower-class women of wartime Beijing, who have not left behind diaries or personal accounts of their lives. Instead, they speak through cases found in the "Offenses against the Institutions of Marriage and the Family" records from the Beijing District Court between 1939 and 1949. Ma uses these files to understand the hardships that women faced in the war-torn city and the survival tactics they employed to overcome them, as well as how the Japanese and Nationalist states (and, at the very end, the Communist state) responded to those actions.

For the vast majority of women living in Republican Beijing, economic struggles were a way of life (chapter 1). Social reformers viewed the city's high poverty rate (at least 50% and possibly as high as 75%, even before the war with Japan broke out) with alarm, regarding poverty as an impediment to national productivity and the development of a body politic.¹ In the absence of a large industrial sector, however, Beijing's lower-class women did not have the opportunity to engage in the type of formal occupation (zhiye 職業) that the reformers encouraged. Instead of joining the factory line, poor women generally engaged in flexible and informal work arrangements, such as taking in washing, ironing, or mending.

Ultimately, though, women were financially dependent on their husbands, and when those spouses failed to provide for the household during times of hardship, some women responded by running away and remarrying (chapter 2). As Ma explains, this was a survival tactic, not a feminist statement: "Runaway wives were hoping to find a solvent husband … it never occurred to them to resist the domestic hierarchy itself" (116). In the face of wartime instability and shortages, women whose spouses were good providers enjoyed some measure of security.

In chapter 3, "Women in the Tenements," Ma explores the physical world of Beijing's lower-class women, who lived in the city's crowded alleyway homes. Migration from the countryside in the early twentieth century—itself a survival tactic for both men and women seeking escape from even more difficult conditions at home—had swelled Beijing's population, but available housing stock failed to keep pace with this increase. As a result, tenement neighborhoods grew ever more crowded.

For many women, physical closeness with their neighbors also yielded intimate social networks, often built on the basis of shared kinship or native-place ties. These relationships [End Page E-29] enabled women to turn to trusted neighbors for assistance in times of trouble. In many of the runaway wife cases Ma recounts, the unhappy wife sought counsel and help from a neighbor woman who then played the role of matchmaker, aiding her escape from the original union and then introducing the woman to her second husband.

In establishing these new marriages, runaway...