Concubines in Court: Marriage and Monogamy in Twentieth-Century China

In Concubines in Court, Lisa Tran argues that although legal historians have not studied the legal concept of monogamy as widely as equality, monogamy was just as important to remaking Chinese society during the Republican and Communist eras. Tran builds on Qing-era legal histories on chastity, which explain how the neo-Confucian female virtue of chastity shaped a woman's legal relationship to her spouse and to the state, to explore how the twentieth-century moral and legal concept of monogamy forged a new relationship between state and society. According to Tran, monogamy drew on the same late imperial concept of one husband, one wife (yifu yiqi) as chastity, but monogamy also incorporated so-called “universal” political and legal doctrines, which aimed to make China's legal system appear modern to European, American, and Japanese observers. Thus, whereas the late imperial concept of yifu yiqi, as understood through chastity, required only...