COMPTES RENDUS - AFEC

Comptes rendus
spécifie situations as women committing suicide after a man made unwanted
propositions, indécent remarks, dirty jokes, or obscène gestures,
whether or not he realized how his act would be taken. Cases related to
thèse substatutes reveal a world in which sexual harassment was an explosive
issue that set family elders and women at odds. Quite a few of the
cases she discusses follow this pattern. A woman living alone, either a
widow or a wife whose husband is away, becomes distraught when a
drunken maie neighbor or relative (perhaps her husband's cousin) finds
her alone and flirts with her or suggests in a joking manner some sort of
tryst. She responds in horror, screaming till neighbors corne. Senior family
members try to calm her down, arguing that for the sake of family face,
she should forgive the offender once they get him to kowtow in apology.
The woman, however, sees this as outrageously inadéquate punishment
and after a few days of fuming commits suicide to prove conclusively that
she was not the type of woman who would in any way compromise her
loyalty to her husband. The man is then charged with the capital crime of
provoking a woman to commit suicide by flirting with her. The woman is
canonized as a chastity martyr and her family is granted money to erect a
commemorative arch.
Thèse cases seem to hâve ail the ambiguities of sexual harassment
cases today. What to the man may hâve been playful, the woman finds
demeaning. Since not ail women find the sarne remark offensive, men
complain that standards are unclear. Theiss shows us that family elders,
including mothers-in-law, often thought the woman was over-reacting, and
judges often considered them oversensitive, a view some modem scholars
such as M. J. Meijer hâve shared. Theiss, however, wants us to understand
the women's own perspective. She quotes one woman after another as
stating that she would hâve no way to be a person if the man who had
trifled with her went unpunished. In Theiss's interprétation, her very
personhood was at stake. "To insuit a woman's chastity was to deny her
humanity" (p. 203).
As Theiss sees it, in punishing the men involved in thèse cases severely,
often by death, the state was siding with women, much more than
the families they had married into. Thus, thèse laws did not so much sup-
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