COMPTES RENDUS - AFEC

Comptes rendus
ors on female chastity. She sees the chastity cuit as a central part of their
"civilizing project" and quotes Qianlong as chiding officiais for not recognizing
the evil caused by illicit sex and not probing deeply enough to
uncover the multitude of cases where the woman was as guilty as the man.
One of Theiss's goals is to move away from a view of the Chinese
gender System as stable toward one in which we see fractures and tensions.
Women and their families had différent stakes in chastity-centered virtue,
something especially clear in incest cases. The meaning of norms was
never fixed, but rather was negotiated through processes that involved
both state efforts to define and enforce policy and the actions of both local
élites and ordinary families pursuing their own ends. Theiss argues that
although the state desired to impose uniform gender norms, its laws were
fraught with contradictions and their application involved compromises
with élite values and popular mores, notably women's own views of virtue.
Policy makers assumed that promoting chastity would bolster proper
family hierarchy, but officiais not uncommonly had to défend virtuous
widows from the déprédations of lineage and family authorities.
Like Matthew Sommer, Theiss makes considérable use of archivai
case material, drawing from it not merely officiai's views, but also
évidence of ordinary people's thoughts and actions. Theiss makes the
point that ordinary rural families could rarely maintain strict physical
séparation between men and women. Women who worked in the fields
had to walk past men. Women whose husbands were away had to handle
routine business with neighbors, relatives, and merchants. A funeral could
resuit in the men in the house going away for a few days, leaving a woman
and her small children alone. Judges needed to understand thèse situations,
since they evaluated the seriousness of a crime against chastity according
to their assessment of the woman's intention to live a chaste life. Women
who had to corne into contact with men could achieve sufficient séparation
by their attitude and demeanor.
Theiss's study is particularly rich in its exploration of what she appropriately
calls by the modem term sexual harassment. She notes that
between 1733 and the end of the Qianlong reign fifteen substatutes were
appended to the statute on causing another's suicide to deal with such
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