New Women “Willing to be Concubines”? An Analysis of Extra-marital Co-habitation in the Republican Period

• In Event: New Women, Feminist Activists, Concubines, and Prostitutes: Divisions and Dialogue in the Afterlives of Chinese Polygamous Practices

Abstract

In the May Fourth era, ideas of free love as the sole measurement of the morality of marriage and partnership began to seep into everyday practices. These ideas were especially but not exclusively influential among educated urban elites. New sexual morals and marriage ethics became directives whereby many new women in the pursuit of freedom of love and marriage came to co-habit with, or marry, men who were already married. Extramarital co-habitation was not only a notable new phenomenon during the Republican period, but it was at the same time linked in complex ways to bigamy and concubinage. Pundits argued at length whether the new women engaged in such domestic arrangements were “willing to be concubines.” Republican legal reform was not consistent in terms of its understanding and adjudication of these women’s familial role and place. The wave of co-habitation in the Republican era illuminates the stakes in positions advanced by new and old morality, marriage ethics, and legal principles.

Author

• Hualin Yu, Capital Normal University