UC San Diego Undergraduate Library Research Prize

Winner 2024 Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities Category, nominated by Weijing Lu (Department of History)

This research delves into legal consciousness and women’s agency during the early 1930s in China. In 1931, the Nationalist government implemented the Civil Code of the Republic of China, which granted women important legal rights, such as expanded property ownership and marriage autonomy. Notably, the Code unprecedentedly allowed individuals to be granted divorce by the courts on the grounds of intolerable domestic abuse. While existing literature have suggested an increase in divorce litigations initiated by abused women, indicating a rise in their legal awareness, there has been limited discussion on how abused women leveraged available resources to resist abuse and oppressive sociopolitical conditions prior to taking formal legal action. How did women experiencing domestic abuse navigate their situations in the years following the 1931 Civil Code? Through archival research and in-depth qualitative analysis of legal inquiries made by individuals to three periodicals -- Ling Long, The China Times, and Sin Wan Pao -- from 1932 to 1935, this study reveals how some women analyzed their circumstances and strategically leveraged their familial and social networks and free legal consultation to subtly resist and alter their historical conditions. By contextualizing the findings within the sociopolitical and legal contexts, this research provides insights into the complexities of Chinese women’s history, challenging traditional narratives of women being passive victims of oppression by illustrating their active agency in navigating their situations. Also, it sheds light on the life experiences of ordinary women in Chinese history, which have frequently been overlooked, suggesting valuable untapped primary sources for future studies.