The Economic Lives of Rural Women in Qing China: Evidence from Nanbu County, 1656-1911
Home > The Economic Lives of Rural Women in Qing China: Evidence from Nanbu County, 1656-1911
This blog post by Supeng Wang (University of Oxford) reflects ongoing research supported by the Economic History Society’s Research Fund for Graduate Students.
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My PhD research on the economic lives of rural women in Qing China is being generously supported by the EHS Research Fund for Graduate Students. The £1,000 research grant will enable me to visit local libraries and archives in China to collect county-level court records. This short blog post highlights how these new empirical findings might enrich our knowledge of the often-neglected economic experience of rural women, which is essential to understanding and explaining China’s long-term economic trajectory.
We still know surprisingly little even about the basic facts regarding Chinese rural women in the pre-modern period. For understandable reasons, historians have traditionally focused more on groups who have left richer records. Not only has the experience of women been systematically understudied in the economic and social history of Qing China, but even within studies on “the other half”, recent scholarship has focused almost exclusively on upper-class women who were recorded in official and literary materials. When it becomes imperative to include rural women, as in macro-level quantification of the Qing economy, economic historians have mostly relied on scattered evidence produced by men, which is impressionistic and often biased by ideological assumptions. Moreover, almost all evidence comes from the single geographic zone of the Lower Yangzi – partly due to the accessibility of the evidence, and partly influenced by the comparative framework inspired by the California School.
So a much-needed next step is to expand the empirical base by shifting focus from urban elite to the rural poor, from the Lower Yangzi to the vast hinterland of Qing China, from the myths of men’s perspectives to women’s own voices, and from de jure economic rights and constraints to de facto economic activities. That is why it is exciting to receive generous research support from the Economic History Society, which allows me the rare opportunity to fill these gaps by collecting local court records from the remote region of Nanbu County during the Qing Dynasty.
Local court cases have the potential to cast light on Qing rural women’s economic lives for a multitude of reasons. A complete local court file typically encompasses a wide array of documents, including but not limited to plaintiffs’ and defendants’ claims, magistrates’ responses, summonses and warrants, trial transcripts, supporting documents filed by the litigants, and magistrates’ final decisions. This wealth of documentation makes it possible to extractive rich information about the case, its administrative and legal progression, and the parties involved. Most importantly, compared with other types of sources such as local gazetteers, genealogies, and private contracts and account books, court cases contain much richer individual-level information regarding the type of activities women engaged in and the details of exactly what they did. Even though legal records also suffer from selection bias, they still offer a sample that is much more representative of the experiences of ordinary women than almost all alternative sources. Although not directly authored by women, trial transcripts provide the closest approximation to rural women’s own voices. Finally, court records are characterised by their large scale, high uniformity, and striking continuity, which enable systematic analyses across long historical timespans.
The local court cases I plan to analyse come from the 84,010 legal and administrative records surviving for Nanbu County in Sichuan Province, spanning the period from 1656 to 1911. For the past few decades, the local archive has greatly improved the accessibility and user-friendliness of this source by digitising the records and developing an exhaustive case catalogue. Even so, this archive still remains under-utilised in economic and social history. The specific temporal and geographical features of this source provide an ideal context for exploring women’s economic lives. Temporally, the source’s extensive time frame and continuity afford room for long-term analysis and cross-period comparison. Geographically, while the socio-economic ordinariness of Nanbu County is yet to be established, this mountainous county located in the bordering province of Qing’s South-West is quite different from the better-researched Lower Yangzi which was in many ways an exceptional zone of China during the Qing Dynasty.
This study will exploit Nanbu court cases to construct an “as-if” individual-level survey from which analytically useful information on women’s economic lives can be extracted and analysed systematically. The key methodological step is to establish cross-sectional individual-level datasets across time using the personal and economic information which these court cases contain about both women and men. I hope to sample observations of the economic activities individual women and men extracted from around 3,000 cases. To maximise the chance for the dataset to include all information relevant to actual economic activities, I will not only include job titles and properties mentioned in the source, but will also use the “verb-oriented method” now favoured by many historians working on gender and work, which focuses not on formal occupations but on the tasks people are actually observed doing.
Of course, court records are such special materials that one cannot ignore the potential for bias, concealment, omission, and falsification arising in judicial and administrative procedures. But I am convinced that this source is quite reliable on ordinary economic activities, which were often unrelated to the judicial focus of the court case. The huge volume of the source, combined with a systematic approach, can help minimize the effect of individual-level errors and biases. And alternative sources available for studying pre-modern Chinese women typically present even more serious problems. While recognizing the challenges of working with pre-modern primary sources to find out about ordinary women, I believe that a critical and rigorous approach to these rich documents promises substantive insights about rural Qing women’s economic lives – and, I would argue, the long-term development of the Chinese economy and society.
To contact the author:
Supeng Wang
University of Oxford
