Drowning daughters: A cultural history of female infanticide in late nineteenth century China.

摘要

This study historicizes the practice of female infanticide in China, comparing writings from Chinese and Western observers in the late nineteenth century. It is centered on the Jiangnan region in the period before and after the Taiping Rebellion [1851-64]. While female infanticide was an object of cultural authority for Western commentators of the time, who bolstered competing claims of expert knowledge on the subject of China writ large, it was an object of moral authority for Chinese writers, for whom it stood as but one of many social behaviors inscribed into a system of cosmic rewards and retributions. By the early twentieth century, the preeminence of moral authority in the Chinese context gave way to scientific authority, as the discourse against infanticide was rewritten into a new context of population science, eugenics, and women's rights.; The two main protagonists are Gabriel Palatre [1830-78], a French Jesuit missionary based in Shanghai, and Yu Zhi [1809-74], a Chinese schoolteacher from the nearby town of Wuxi. Chapter 1 analyzes the narrative strategies used in Western debates over the prevalence of Chinese infanticide through the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 examines nineteenth century Chinese didactic writings, which placed the practice of infanticide into a context of moral authority, involving a relational network that extended beyond the mother and father, to include the midwife, mother-in-law, female neighbors, and even village scholars. Chapter 3 dissects Gabriel Palatre's study of Chinese infanticide, which categorized Chinese texts under French rubrics, reducing them to atomized pictures and texts, divorced from any moral vector. Chapter 4 explores the embodiment of moral authority through the life and work of Yu Zhi, who favored oral expressive forms of village lectures and operatic plays for the cultivation of moral values. Chapter 5 considers the various life options that faced girls rescued from infanticide, who could be placed as child brides, sent to an orphanage, or raised in their own families with the support of a native charitable society. Ultimately, the incommensurability of Chinese and Western alternatives for rescued infants was profoundly exposed with the Tianjin Massacre of 1870.