Everyday Modernity in China

2. The Violence of the Everyday in Early Twentieth-Century China

2 The Violence of the Everyday in Early Twentieth-Century China rebecca karl Everyday life, a compound of insignificances united in this concept, responds and corresponds to modernity. —henri lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World In the prefatory remarks to his famed 1903 pamphlet Nüjie zhong (A bell for the women’s world), the social critic Jin Yi commented, “There is not a place in today’s world where male domination of women has not triumphed; if they are not treated as playthings, then they are used as colonized territory [kou bu yiwei wanhao, zi yiwei zhimindi ye].”1 This remark eªectively introduced Jin’s withering attack on the congeries of social practices that he and many of his political sympathizers and contemporaries saw as shaping the benighted condition of women in late Qing China and the early twentieth-century world. Jin’s list of repressive social practices included those concerned with female morality and virtue (daode), the female disposition (pinxing), female abilities (nengli), educational methods ( jiaoyu zhi fangfa), disparities in social power and rights (quanli), women’s political participation, and marriage. This list is now familiar as a catalogue of ills, but it is well to remember that Jin was the first in China to collect these issues into a coherent outline of what was later to be named the “woman problem” ( funü wenti).2 Indeed, not only did his list enumerate all the issues for the first time, but the language he used set the tone and parameters for much subsequent usage. His summarizing comment e‹ciently combined various issues—women as playthings, colonization, and embodied (territorial) relations—that constituted the his- torical problematic from which his list emanated and to which it gave voice and shape in the context of his time. For a contrast to Jin’s tentative conceptualization of the problematic that China faced, we can consult a passage from a 1902 essay by the Wenzhou literati Song Shu (Song Pingzi).3 Song’s essay is an exhortation against foot binding written in colloquial Chinese; it was delivered as a speech by Song and then distributed in Wenzhou (southeastern China) to local leaders. It was clearly intended to provide arguments, from the perspective of a respected member of the traditional literati class, against various local social resistances to unbinding women’s feet and to the general, elite-led anti-foot-binding wave of the early twentieth century.4 Toward the end of the essay Song wrote at length about what he perceived as one of the most egregious aspects of social behavior linked to foot binding: the practice of roughhousing in the nuptial chamber at a wedding (nao dongfang , now more commonly called nao xinfang). He exhorted: Just think about it: what is nao dongfang other than rendering the bride of a decent family into a prostitute? After chasing away the [bride’s] female companion , men squeeze into the chamber until it is full; they then snicker and joke at will, they even go to the extent of fondling [her] hands and feet, of caressing [her] head and breast. . . . [But] the strangest thing of all is that upon entry into the nuptial chamber, the first thing out of their mouths is a question about the length of the feet; they lift their eyes to verify whether the feet are long or short, they raise their hands to feel whether the feet are big or small.5 As he pointed out farther along, the people of Wenzhou, originally from the North, carried with them to the South in the late Tang dynasty neither the custom of nao dongfang nor that of foot binding. But, as Song commented, “when women began to bind up their feet, men began to nao dongfang.” Song concluded that if people were genuinely worried about the socially and morally destabilizing eªects of unbinding women’s feet—which could include the blurring of boundaries between male and female and the potential looseness of female behavior—then the practice of nao dongfang, with its oªensive overstepping of the boundaries of propriety in the guise of play, must also be eradicated . According to Song, foot binding was an anachronistic and socially dangerous practice. Therefore, it was not a return to the former practices of The Violence of the Everyday 53 roject MUSE (2024-04-26 14:17 GMT) not binding feet and not roughhousing that represented social danger or deviance from social propriety; rather, the continuation of the contemporary...