By focusing on stories of lower-class women charged under “Offenses against the Institutions of Marriage and the Family” (fanghai hunyin jiating zui) in Beijing from 1937 to 1949, Zhao Ma details everyday lives under the turbulent economy and modern state-building efforts of successive wartime regimes (Guomindang, Japanese Occupation forces, and Communist), and examines key themes animating recent urban, labor, and women's history studies of prewar and wartime China.Footnote 1 While the case files of women charged with crimes of bigamy (chonghun), adultery (tongjian), and abduction (youguai) may provide only partial stories of extraordinary circumstances, and only of married women, Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing gives more than “a good enough story” (p. 31). The book moves between the daily “survival tactics” of lower-class women and larger spheres of social reformist, elite feminist, legal, and modern disciplinary state campaigns. Beijing's lower-class women emerge as central to a world of changing practices of marriage, sexuality, work, travel, and forms of women's public presence.
Chapter 1 discusses the developing official and social reformist discourse of zhiye (occupation) as an ideal of a modern industrial workforce engaged in regular and skilled productive and moral labor. Zhiye discourse envisioned such labor as central to women's liberation (p. 39). Beijing's minuscule formal industrial sector, however, meant that lower-class women were usually precariously employed in an informal economy of low-paid serial labor. Ma reveals not only the difficulties married lower-class women in finding stable gainful employment to decrease their dependency on men, but also the lack of official and social reformist recognition for the labor they did perform. Running away from a marriage and entering a new one thus becomes a key survival tactic of lower-class women that the book examines.
Chapter 2 focuses on women claiming a “lack of the source of livelihood” (wuyou shenghuo) from husbands when charged with adultery or bigamy (p. 87). Lower-class women, their families, and court judges all tended to accept that men were providers and women dependents, despite new laws fostering more financially equal gender dynamics in marriage. Ma argues that unlike more elite women, lower-class women did not abandon marriages to oppose male authority. Instead, male authority was challenged indirectly as men became “victims” of their expected role as breadwinners in a time of wartime poverty (p. 89). One may, however, consider women's use of the still-accepted language of their dependency and moral purity to justify actions with other reasons. Male authority may also not have been seriously shaken, as runaway wives were still tracked down by husbands, brought to court, and put under intense scrutiny about their motivations and actions.
While lower-class women may have been dependent on men, they were not without a community to turn to in times of need. Tenement communities in wartime Beijing helped women escape from untenable familial situations and find new jobs and partners (chapter 3), and provided crucial community recognition for marital arrangements that may not have otherwise complied with new official regulations for marriages (chapter 4). Officials and social reformers viewed the transience and crowding of the tenements as fostering immorality, criminality, and “backward” practices, leading to state surveillance efforts aimed at them—from revamping the imperial-period baojia to new household registration (hukou) and identity card (juzhuzheng) schemes. Lower-class women, however, deployed flexible neighborhood networks to evade and manipulate this surveillance. Despite such local communal tactics, Ma argues that tenement networks were often self-serving, and not a basis for sustained solidarity or formal resistance to institutional and political agendas.
The final chapters focus on a wider spectrum of mobile lives and state attempts to manage them. Chapter 5 surveys increasingly reliable transportation that allowed women access to regional markets. Chapter 6 discusses women's use of cheap hotels and wayside inns for refuge, illicit trade, and sexual encounters. Ma reveals Beijing's lower-class women as a “driving force” for “a new relationship between womanhood and urban public space” (p. 286) that also elicited official alarm about improper female behavior in public. A female police force patrolling Beijing's tenements, train stations, and city gates (p. 293) is also mentioned, but warrants more study. Overall, these chapters expose successive wartime regimes’ views of lower-class women's activities and mobility as potential threats to social and domestic order, while women themselves creatively negotiated new security measures in their struggles for survival.
The continuity of the state apparatus and vision of women's domestic and public lives of the Guomindang, Japanese, and Communists is a main insight of this book. The conclusion, however, discusses the Communists’ successful recruitment of lower-class women's labor and collective political consciousness, which may mitigate the book's general assertion that lower-class women lacked such consciousness. Ultimately, though, Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing richly shows how grand narratives of “awakening and progress” (p. 11) may not account for the everyday tactics of survival and resistance of populations such as lower-class women in wartime Beijing.
