UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation examines the relationship between state visions of penal reform and actual conditions in women’s prisons in the coastal cities of Shanghai and Tianjin during a quarter century of political change encompassing Nationalist political control, Japanese occupation, civil war, and the early years of the People’s Republic of China. In particular, my research addresses a body of literature on the “woman problem,” a topic of heated public debate centered on the status of women and their proper role in twentieth-century China. I ask the following question: what was the place of problem women — the unruly, the indigent, and the criminal — within the woman problem? Even though women criminals were among the most disenfranchised members of Chinese society, their lives touched on important issues of national debate about women’s purported inherent weakness and its relationship to national weakness. Government reformers and planners believed that the reform of criminal women — who were often compelled to serve sentences in modern prisons — played an integral role in successful state building.