Reforming Social Customs through Law
Dynamics and Discrepancies in the Nationalist Reform of the Adoptive Daughter-in-Law
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19509769 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yue Du (0000-0002-3865-0805, Cornell University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 76-106 |
| Publication date | 2019-06-18 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | NAN Nü (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1387-6805 • E-ISSN: 1568-5268 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1163/15685268-00211p03 |
| OpenAlex | W3000670880 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
Tongyang , rearing daughters-in-law from childhood, was widely practiced as a form of bride price marriage and transactional family building in late imperial and Republican China. Denounced as feudal and backward in twentieth-century public discourse, this time-honored and once legally-protected form of marriage went through significant law reforms in the Republican era. This article examines how the Nationalist Guomindang (GMD) party-state (1928-1949) re-conceptualized tongyang by introducing foreign-inspired notions of parenthood as duty-bound guardianship, and marriage as a union of free choice between spouses. The reformed law annulled the legal relationship between “parents-in-law” and their adoptive daughters-in-law, which enabled adoptive daughters-in-law and their natal parents to dissolve previously established tongyang arrangements through litigation. But outside the courtroom, the Nationalist state adopted a non-interventionist approach toward the practice of tongyang , and took no actions to identify people who violated the law. This particular way of reforming social customs through reforming the law limited the effect of the GMD anti- tongyang legislation on a deeply-rooted social practice. The Nationalist reform of the adoptive daughter-in-law provides historians with a useful lens to discuss the dilemma Nationalist lawmakers faced as they treaded between the lines of offending popular customs and enforcing a rigid new social order through law, the balance of which was intimately connected with the regime’s legitimacy
Common law · Duty · Legislation · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law
| Citations per year | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |