On the Lives of Women Unwed by Choice in Pre-communist China: Research in Progress

ON THE LIVES OF WOMEN UNWED BY CHOICE IN PRE-COMMUNIST CHINA: RESEARCH IN PROGRESS By Maria H. A. Jaschok Vow at the shuqi ceremony "In the year of ••• , in the month of ••• , on this day, this female named••• will henceforth remain unmarried. She will remain pure. She hopes that the ancestors will give her all their blessing and protection." Zhu Hua, zishunu, 75 years old "When I saw Elder Sister and Sister-in-law suffer such hardships, I was petrified. I thought, whatever happens, I won't get married." "I saw through life. Woman's life is about marriage, giving birth, work. What's the meaning of all that?" I. Notes on the Research into the Lives of Unmarried Women I met Zhu Hua in the late summer of 1983. Tiny and of a deceptive appearance of birdlike frailty, she combines an innocent wistfulness with a pragmatic outlook which is the result of a long and hard life. Introduced to her through her beloved great-niece and the latter's close friend, it did not take very long until I became a naturally accepted, if somewhat exotic, member of her world of unmarried women where talking constitutes one of the most important ways of relaxing, communicating, learning, gossiping and enjoying. And thus we talked; from time to time we were joined by curious tenants, and later on by another unmarried woman, a friend of Zhu Hua, who added her own comments from her experience of single life. This interview with Zhu Hua is part of a project that I have been engaged in for some time during my three years of work in China. A relatively uncharted territory of women's history in China, the phenomenon of unmarried women in Guangdong Province has so far been studied in the West by two scholars, the British anthropologist Marjorie Tapley and Andrea P. Sankar, an American anthropologist.[!] In China the subject is ignored as connotative of "feudal and backward" practices, not in line, a Chinese anthropologist put to me most emphatically, with current priorities that concentrate on the constructive, or positive, aspects of social development. The woman who is allowed to take her place in the hectically modernizing 42 society of contemporary China is the worker whose use-value to the economy is unquestioned, but who at the same time holds a central, and utterly traditional, place in the family-nexus as a daughter-inlaw , wife, and mother. The modern socialist woman is by definition a productive working member of the qommunity, a manager of her household, and the bearer of the officially~approved one child per family. There is no room for aberration: against this background the history of zishunu[2], and other categories of unmarried women, is ignored by Chinese scholars as at best peripheral to contemporary academic concerns. It is the perceived wisdom that the practice not to wed, although its history is still an ongoing one, has nothing to teach the contemporary Chinese woman. Tapley's and Sankar's studies of the phenomenon of unmarried women cite a combination of factors as having been responsible for its emergence in Guangdong, giving rise to women who resisted marriage, who formed sisterhoods, who lived in separate women's houses, who lived in lesbian relationships, who purchased mooijai (slave-girls) to perform the role of wife and mother on their behalf. These women were known to exist in Guangdong Province before Liberation, some of them surviving until today alone or as couples. The different lifestyles of unmarried women as they evolved in the late 19th century out of certain extant local institutions--such as the interrupted-residence marriage[3]--attracted many females when increased employment opportunities in the local silk-industry made possible both economic independence and a high status. Subjective factors, such as fear of sexual intercourse and childbirth, as well as cruel treatment by imperious mothers-in-law, added to the widespread popularity of the choice not to marry. These fears were not new, but the availability of an alternative to the married state--the source of these fears--meant that they could be acted upon. No statistics can be found, but Sankar speculates that in Guangdong at...