History Job Candidate Seminar

Abstract: What did married, non-elite women living in eighteenth century China see as theirs in life? What did they claim domain over? My forthcoming book project, titled What She Had, What She Wanted: Women's Defiance in Late Imperial China, turns to the extraordinary to unlock a new realm of possibilities for our understanding of the everyday. In this talk, I draw upon the testimonies of women sentenced to death for killing their husbands to shed new light on unknown patterns of women's property holdings. I explore the strategies wives employed to challenge their husbands' authority over what they conceived as their property, both large and small, from one woman's secret land purchase to another's struggle to keep the headscarf she made. I argue that only when we encounter these economically desperate households—where wives worked to support their husbands and husbands failed to provide for their families—do we gain a clear sense of the actions women took to establish spheres of economic autonomy for themselves outside their husbands' control.