Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China / Edition 1 available in Hardcover, eBook
Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0804785988
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804785983
- Pub. Date:
- 01/08/2014
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0804785988
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804785983
- Pub. Date:
- 01/08/2014
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China / Edition 1
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Overview
Between Birth and Death locates a significant historical shift in the representation of female infanticide during the nineteenth century. It was during these years that the practice transformed from a moral and deeply local issue affecting communities into an emblematic cultural marker of a backwards Chinese civilization, requiring the scientific, religious, and political attention of the West. Using a wide array of Chinese, French and English primary sources, the book takes readers on an unusual historical journey, presenting the varied perspectives of those concerned with the fate of an unwanted Chinese daughter: a late imperial Chinese mother in the immediate moments following birth, a male Chinese philanthropist dedicated to rectifying moral behavior in his community, Western Sinological experts preoccupied with determining the comparative prevalence of the practice, Catholic missionaries and schoolchildren intent on saving the souls of heathen Chinese children, and turn-of-the-century reformers grappling with the problem as a challenge for an emerging nation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804785983 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/08/2014 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Between Birth and Death
FEMALE INFANTICIDE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHINA
By Michelle T. King
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8598-3
CHAPTER 1
Deciding a Child's Fate
Women and Birth
That we can say anything about the life of the woman Ye (1567–1659) is only the result of the writings of her youngest son, Chen Que (1604–77), a prominent philosopher during the transition between the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. Although it is little known, Ye's story is precious: in the course of my research it is the only example I have found of a late imperial Chinese woman describing her own experience of infanticide, in her own language. Ye's recounting of the act of infanticide appears in the context of a memorial written by her son to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of his father's death, when Ye herself was eighty-nine and near the end of her own life. Much of the memorial involves Ye's narration to her son of the struggles she and his father endured during their early years of marriage. This brief account is written in straightforward language; the events it describes are not unusual. Yet all the same it is a remarkable testament. In one short passage, Ye humanizes and complicates our everyday notions about female infanticide in late imperial China:
Most of my life, I have never had any secrets to weigh down my heart. The only thing is when I was twenty-four, I gave birth to a girl, and drowned her. Even now I regret it. At the time, we were so poor that we had not a thing in our house. There was just a chicken, which I was saving for after I gave birth. Right before the moment of birth came, though, someone ate my chicken.
At the same time, my father was in Hangzhou, and he sent someone home to my stepmother, urging her, "The Chens' daughter [referring to Ye's husband's family name] has given birth. Send someone immediately to look after her," supposing that something would be brought for me. Eventually my stepmother sent a servant boy, Chang Shou, to come and serve me—empty-handed. [Instead of helping me,] he found some food and made it for himself.
I was at my wits' end. My mother and father had given birth to me, but after growing up, I still had to suffer in this way. As for this mere fleck of foam [referring to her own daughter]—what would be the point of raising her? It would only be in vain: no good for me, and no good for her. So I made up my mind to drown her.
After losing so much blood during birth, I couldn't get up, so I ordered the servant girl from your grandparents' house, Si Xiu, to drown it. She put it into shallow water, but it didn't die the whole night long. I was so furious, I forced myself to get up, and shut the door in order to drown her. I turned my head, closed my eyes and then did it. I couldn't look. Alas! How could I have done such a cruel thing?
What do we make of Ye's decision? Do we condemn her for committing infanticide, knowing that she still regrets this one dark deed in her life? Or do we sympathize with her—impoverished, emotionally bereft, and having just undergone the most physically draining task a woman's body ever undertakes—in all the moments leading up to that point? Ye's dilemma illuminates the very human drama of infanticide in late imperial China, and hints at the many elements influencing a woman's decision: the family's economic status, her lack of physical support, her emotional vulnerability immediately after birth and the long perspective of her experience as a woman up to that moment. Each segment of the story addresses larger themes that we will explore in this chapter, pushing an analysis of gender in infanticide beyond female victimhood to consider how it factored more broadly into family, birth experience and morality.
Clearly, Ye's tale is set within a society that, if depicted in broad strokes, valued men over women. It is easy, from our present day vantage point, to condemn the system that perpetuated this behavior. But what if, instead of judging from the here and now, we attempt instead to imagine the view from then and there: what actions would have made sense to those who were part of such a cultural system? Working within the constraints of the historical sources left to us, in this chapter I want to bring to life that crucial moment immediately after the birth of a daughter, when infanticide was not yet an act to be condemned, but a decision yet to be made. This approach brings us directly into the inner chambers of the Chinese family, into an almost exclusively female world. Not only for biological reasons but also for social ones of gender segregation, the act of giving birth in late imperial China was an arena where women prevailed. Parturient mothers were generally assisted by older female relatives or neighbors, or perhaps a midwife. Husbands normally stayed outside the birth room, and male doctors would be called upon only in special cases, for elite families who could afford their ser vices.
Yet illuminating a female perspective on infanticide in late imperial China is a challenge, because men authored all extant Chinese sources on the subject. The story of the woman Ye offers keen insights, as we are able to place infanticide as one episode within the long span of a real late imperial woman's life. But to achieve a broader understanding of women's involvement in infanticide, we must also turn to other extant sources, such as late imperial medical texts and morality books. Although neither of these maleauthored genres provides direct expressions of women's experiences, they do offer some insight into normative understandings and explanations of the practice and ethics of infanticide. Focusing on the expectations leading up to birth, the act of birth itself and the assignment of moral responsibility after birth allows us to reinsert women into the history of infanticide in late imperial China as more than just the simple victims of a patriarchal system. Mothers like the woman Ye were often complicit in the decision to commit female infanticide, yet moral responsibility never fell on their shoulders alone. The most striking feature of late imperial Chinese writings about female infanticide is that they addressed a large circle of adult participants, both male and female, who were all in some way held morally accountable. At the same time, women did not avoid close scrutiny for their involvement as mothers, midwives, relatives and neighbors.
WOMAN YE, INFANTICIDAL MOTHER
The woman Ye, who is known only by her family name, was the oldest of nine siblings, all children of Ye Zhan, a successful candidate of the provincial level of the three-tiered imperial civil examination system, a status that made it possible for him to hold a position as an official. Her life path followed the idealized route to happiness for a late imperial Chinese woman, as described by Susan Mann, by getting married, giving birth to a son, raising him to be a success and finding him a dutiful wife to marry (and gaining for herself a filial daughter-in-law in the process). At or before the age of twenty-one, Ye was married into a family less prosperous than her own, the Chen family of Haining, Zhejiang Province, to the second of four sons, Chen Yingbo (1564–1630). Unlike her father, Ye's husband passed only the county level of the examination system, which meant status as a local elite and permission to try for the next examination level but which did not lead to a government post. Ye herself successfully fulfilled her own reproductive role in the family by giving birth to four sons and continuing her husband's family line. Her first son was born when she was twenty-two, the second when she was twenty-seven, a third at thirty-one and Chen Que, the fourth and youngest son, when she was thirty-eight. At an unspecified age, perhaps between her third and fourth sons, she also gave birth to another daughter who did live to adulthood. At fifty-five, her youngest son finally married, and three years later he welcomed the birth of his own son, allowing Ye to complete what Charlotte Furth has called the "cycle connecting generations." After the death of her husband when she was sixty-four, Ye lived another twenty-nine years as a widow and matriarch, recognizing sadly in her late years that "those born before me have all died, while I alone remain." Apart from being the mother of the philosopher Chen Que, the only other noteworthy aspect of her life was its longevity: she outlived not only her husband but also her three eldest sons, flourishing until the ripe old age of ninety-three.
The traditional shorthand notation of Three Followings (sancong) refers to the three life stages governing a woman's behavior: a woman should follow her father before marriage, her husband after marriage and her son after widowhood. Directly or indirectly, the story told by Ye does indeed bear upon her relationships to the men in her life. She is telling her son a story about life with her husband, and her father appears in it as an important figure. In par tic u lar, Ye's relationship to her son is significant, as her very existence in the historical record is a result of her position as "Chen Que's mother." This is a crucial point: had Ye never borne a son, we would probably never have even learned of her regret for killing her first daughter. Only a small percentage of elite women in late imperial China were literate, and those who did write never addressed the topic of infanticide. The very telling of this tale of infanticide, therefore, is not exclusively Ye's own narration, since it was ultimately written down by her son and may have been edited by him, although it is expressed from her point of view, in her voice. The eventual birth of Ye's four sons, moreover, may well have afforded her the luxury of past regret: had she given birth only to daughters, who knows how she might have felt about drowning her first?
Ye's narrative mixes a sense of wifely pride in her husband with a certain degree of frustration. More suited to a life of study than to house hold economies, her husband was always ready to help friends and relatives in need, but he was ill-equipped to manage his own family matters. In her retelling, his family did little to help them, and the couple was more often than not rescued by her father's generosity. Her husband had no official position, and made a meager, sporadic income through teaching, while she tried to supplement their income by spinning, weaving and buying up seeds and tools to plant their small, barren farm acreage. Plagued by bad luck and misfortune, Chen Que's father fell seriously ill two years before the episode of infanticide and the couple had to pawn everything, including their clothes, to pay the doctor. Ye's own father, on his way to a funeral, stopped by to pay them a visit. Ye describes the scene to her son: "Because your father had no clothes to wear, he could not come out to meet your grandfather. Only after a long while, having sent out to borrow a garment of rough white cotton from a cloth shop ... was he able to come out. As your grandfather asked after your father, tears streamed down his face. I too was hardly able to raise my head to look."
It is all the more striking, then, that in a narrative that mostly highlights their life together as a married couple, the episode recounting infanticide belongs to the woman Ye alone. At the moment of birth, Ye seems to have been without much support from her natal family, and no mention is made of her husband or her husband's family. We see how she has had to do everything herself, carefully saving a chicken for a postpartum meal (broth was frequently cited as the best nourishment for a new mother), only to endure the indignity of someone else eating it. Her father was in another city and tries to arrange for help. But her words reveal her strained relationship with her stepmother, who was "unwilling to show the tiniest sympathy." The servant boy her stepmother sends is worse than useless—he not only arrives empty-handed, he does nothing but take care of himself. Ye's decision to commit infanticide highlights the palpable connection between her present indignities and the fate of her newborn daughter. She recognizes everything her father and birth mother did to raise her, all of which has come to naught. Why should she and her daughter both suffer? Since the maid is incapable of doing the deed, Ye must, as with everything else, take care of this matter with her own two hands. Some sixty-five years later, the episode remains one of the strongest memories in her long life.
Within the context of the memorial, the episode of infanticide seems intended as yet another example of the family's struggles in their early years of poverty. The trope of the poor scholar was a common one in late imperial writing. Chen Que's parents undoubtedly had very little, but neither were they at the very bottom rungs of society. Ye's father was a passed provincial exam candidate, after all, and her husband did achieve county-level exam status. They had been allotted some acres of land by her husband's family, however barren, and they did have the help of the extended family's servants, however in effective. Indeed, later in life, Chen Que's father eventually managed to build a family compound, however ramshackle, so that his four sons could marry. Moreover, another daughter was later born into the family and eventually married. At the moment of the first daughter's birth, however, the combination of circumstances—general poverty (or at any rate the perception of poverty), along with physical and emotional vulnerability after birth, and frustration at her own and her newborn daughter's lot in life—leads to infanticide. Looking back de cades later, Chen Que's mother cannot believe her own past conduct. What comes across to readers, though, is not her weakness, but her strength. The narration of her entire life is marked by various episodes in which she always took it upon herself to do what ever was required. "I have never been one to beg from others," she remarks dryly to her son.
DAUGHTERS AND SONS
One of the difficulties of writing about female infanticide in late imperial China is that even raising the topic gives the impression that parents never wanted daughters or were somehow incapable of loving girls. A daughter could indeed be a cherished child, particularly in elite families, when she would be described as a "pearl in the palm." In the story of the woman Ye, for example, time and again she and her husband are rescued by her own father, rather than turning to her husband's family. It is her father who sends servants to help plow and water their fields, and then food to feed the servants when they are exhausted. He feels deeply for his daughter and her husband, and cannot help but cry when he realizes the depth of their poverty. Weijing Lu, Hsiung Ping-chen and Susan Mann have examined written accounts from Ming and Qing fathers, who doted on their daughters in life and mourned them deeply in death. Mothers, too, left behind written expressions of care and grief over daughters, such as the poem by one eighteenth-century woman on the occasion of the birth of her second daughter, recalling the death of her first daughter from smallpox.
Essays against the practice of female infanticide, written by male elites for audiences of other men, tried to emphasize these bonds that tied men to women within the traditional family structure. The author of a pop u lar late imperial essay against infanticide, Gui Zhongfu, was a scholar from Hunan Province who passed the provincial exam in 1744 and later served as a county magistrate in Jiangsu Province. In his essay Jie ninü wen (Essay Against the Drowning of Daughters), which was reprinted throughout the nineteenth century, Gui Zhongfu urged other men to consider their relationships with the significant women in their lives: "Where do our bodies come from? If it were not for my mother, how would I come into being? ... Today's daughter is tomorrow's mother. Today's mother who bears a daughter is a girl who was not drowned in the past. Our sons and grandsons came from women who were not drowned. The wives of our sons and grandsons are daughters who were not drowned by others." The worth of a daughter's life, in other words, could be measured by her future roles as a wife and a mother of sons, contained within a normal cycle of family reproduction. The practice of female infanticide, Gui lamented, meant that this natural cycle of birth and family would grind to a halt: "If one person drowns a daughter, everyone will do the same, and soon all will have no daughters. If everyone eventually has no daughters, then all will eventually have no wives. If everyone has no wives, then people themselves will die out."
In these didactic essays against infanticide, daughters were rarely prized outside of their future reproductive roles as wives and mothers. Even when male essayists did draw attention to a daughter's inherent value, it was still reckoned within the bonds of the family, as a function of the daughter's filiality toward her parents. One song, cited in an essay discouraging female infanticide, for example, argued that daughters would treat their parents better than sons would, caring for them more deeply in old age:
Daughters' natures are the most gentle and kind,
They love their parents better than sons.
Sons go out more often,
Daughters remain by their parents.
Sons are more disobedient,
Daughters always listen to their parents.
Sons go on long journeys more often,
Daughters stay near their parents.
Sons are less prone to sorrow,
Daughters always cry for their parents.
Daughters have filial hearts,
And always help their parents.
Daughters with a good husband,
Will always show it to their parents.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Between Birth and Death by Michelle T. King. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Figures and Tables viii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1 Deciding a Child's Fate: Women and Birth 15
2 Reforming Customs: Scholars and Morality 46
3 Seeing Bodies: Experts and Evidence 77
4 Saving Souls: Missionaries and Redemption 111
5 Refraining Female Infanticide: The Emerging Nation 149
Conclusion 179
Notes 193
Selected Bibliography 223
Chinese Character List 243
Index 245