Matthew H. Sommer

Abortion in Late Imperial China: Routine Birth Control or Crisis Intervention?

In late imperial China a number of purported methods of abortion were known; but who actually attempted abortion and under what circumstances? Some historians have suggested that abortion was used for routine birth control which presupposes that known methods were safe reliable and readily available. This paper challenges the qualitative evidence on which those historians have relied and presents new evidence from Qing legal sources and modern medical reports to argue that traditional methods of abortion (the most common being abortifacient drugs) were dangerous unreliable and often cost a great deal of money. Therefore abortion in practice was an emergency intervention in a crisis: either a medical crisis in which pregnancy threatened a womans health or a social crisis in which pregnancy threatened to expose a womans extramarital sexual relations. Moreover abortion was not necessarily available even to women who wanted one.

QING COUNTY ARCHIVES IN SICHUAN: AN UPDATE FROM THE FIELD

Historians of Late Imperial China have long recognized that the Ba County archives held by the Sichuan Bureau of Archives in Chengdu constitute the largest and most complete local level archive known to exist. First introduced to Western scholars by Philip Huang (1982) and Madeleine Zelin (1986), the archive has served as a major source for a number of recent monographic studies. 1 Yet for those familiar with the depth and quality of its holdings, it remains a curious fact that this vast resource has not as yet received the sort of attention from European and American scholars that one might expect. At least in part, this may be due to the remoteness of Chengdu, particularly when compared to the relative convenience of using archives held in Beijing, Shang- hai, Nanjing, and Taibei. Another, perhaps more limiting factor, has been the reported administrative difficulties in gaining access to some of the archives holdings as well as in reproducing that material. The three of us had an opportunity to return to the Sichuan Archives in August of 2004 after an absence of four years. Although each of us had sepa- rate research agendas, we were all working primarily within the Ba County archives collection of legal case records. Given the trouble that we had previ- ously experienced in using this material, we were all favorably surprised by the degree to which this section of the archive has been made more open to foreign researchers. This new openness is in part the result of the ongoing work being carried out by the archives staff, much of which must be attrib- uted to the efforts of Mr. Ma Xiaobin, the Vice-director of the Sichuan Bureau of Archives. While we were in Chengdu, Vice-director Ma also introduced the three of us to yet another Qing county archive that has now been opened to foreign scholars, the Nanbu County Archive held by the Nanchong Municipal

A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960-1665

This book brings the study of gender to Chinese medicine and in so doing contextualizes Chinese medicine in history. It examines the rich but neglected tradition of fuke, or medicine for women, over the seven hundred years between the Song and the end of the Ming dynasty. Using medical classics, popular handbooks, case histories, and belles lettres, it explores evolving understandings of fertility and menstruation, gestation and childbirth, sexuality, and gynecological disorders. Furth locates medical practice in the home, where knowledge was not the monopoly of the learned physician and male doctors had to negotiate the class and gender boundaries of everyday life. Women as healers and as patients both participated in the dominant medical culture and sheltered a female sphere of expertise centered on, but not limited to, gestation and birth. Ultimately, her analysis of the relationship of language, text, and practice reaches beyond her immediate subject to address theoretical problems that arise when we look at the epistemological foundations of our knowledge of the body and its history.

The Gendered Body in the Qing Courtroom

T h i s a r T i c l e p r e s e n T s a va r i e T y o f court cases, including homicides and marriage disputes, from eighteenthand nineteenth-century China in which magistrates scrutinized bodies for evidence about gender performance. In order to judge these cases properly, magistrates needed to find out whether the persons under scrutiny were physically capable of normative gender roles or had violated the rules governing such roles; their judgments aimed to repair kinship networks and reinforce patriarchal hierarchies. These boundary-crossing “hard cases” help us understand the complex interweaving of bodily sex and social gender in the Qing: they provide insight into how magistrates (as well as midwives and others who gave evidence) would interpret the body in terms of what society demanded of it. For some time now it has been conventional to posit a clear distinction between sex and gender: sex is transcultural, biologically determined, and grounded in the body, whereas gender is socially and culturally constructed and therefore learned and performed according to varying scripts. as convenient as this sex/gender distinction may be, it has provoked intense debate among feminist theorists about exactly where to draw the line between them—or whether it is even possible to discern a stable, unmediated category of sex (or the body) prior to discourse. It seems, however, that a tentative consensus has emerged, at least among historians of gender and sexuality: while there does exist a real, physical