Hoping for Some Better Days: Twentieth-Century Chinese Women under Clouds of War, Marriage Strains, Social change and Behind Bars

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

This panel weaves together four themes in Chinese women in the 1930s and 1940s. These two decades was largely unsettling when women faced diverse array of challenges and often met with manifold adversity. In both good times and bad times, the state produced models of ideal women and their roles and behavior through laws, regulations and propaganda. The four papers examine women’s lives under various circumstances and how they cope with policies, ideological changes, alongside social tension, poverty and warfare. Nevertheless, life might not be as bad as we imagine because these women captured the transience of peace and joy that occasionally flashed. More importantly, there was always hope for some better days. The panel begins with the discussion of freedom of marriage, a disputable issue issue presented by Venus Viana. Kim Kyung Yeob’s paper centers on prison life of female inmates who were largely ignored by the state and society. Virgil Ho’s paper focuses on a heavier issue. He demonstrates how Cantonese women reacted to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The panel ends by moving northward towards northeast China. Bianca Yin-ki Cheung will tell us how gender norms were challenged and reproduced in the political culture of the Chinese Communist Part. Through this panel, we hope to demonstrate that Chinese women in the two difficult decades of the twentieth century strove and overcame social and political challenges and economic hardships in the hope of a better future.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Venus Viana, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Individual Presentations

• Good Girls or Bad Girls?: The Ambiguity of Modern Marriage in Republican Chinese Villages - Venus Viana, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Gender Inequality Behind Bars: The Life Women Inmates in Republican China (1912-1949) - Kyung Yeob Claudius Kim, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• “Perm hair and strange clothes are not allowed”: Women in Canton during the early years of the War (1937-circa 1939) - Virgil Kit Yiu Ho, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Engendering Labor Models: Imagery of Labor Models during the Civil War in Northeast China, 1945-1949 - Bianca Yin-ki Cheung, HKCC, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University