Family and Gender in Famine: Cultural Responses to Disaster in North China, 1876-1879

Abstract

Imagery used by male local literati to describe the North China Famine of 1876-1879 demonstrates how Confucian ideals and the Chinese family system in the late imperial era should have shaped the moral dilemmas that famine imposed upon women. Local-level Chinese texts about famine place young wives and daughters in physically, morally, and sexually precarious positions during the disaster, but depict elderly mothers as persons with strong claims to a family's dwindling food supply. Demographic studies of famine and gender and observations made by foreign observers, however, call into question the assumption that Chinese families discriminated against young women when dividing a famished household's food supply. They further suggest that the burgeoning trade in women in some cases enabled young women to survive the disaster more successfully than their male counterparts. This article adds a local-level Chinese perspective to the ongoing dialogue on the "feminization of famine."

Women live longer than men even during severe famines and epidemics

“…While increased prostitution rates and migration could partly contribute to the higher survival chances of women (through prostitution women are able to get extra resources; migration reduces the pressure on the scarce resources, thus offering some relief from hunger to those who stay, composed mostly of women, children, and the elderly), child abandonment and infanticide, at least in some cases, could favor boys at the expenses of girls ( 60 ). Various stories from different crises testify to maternal resilience and tell of mothers taking extreme actions that led to the survival of both mother and infant ( 61 – 63 ).…”

Women live longer than men even during severe famines and epidemics

“…While increased prostitution rates and migration could partly contrib-ute to the higher survival chances of women (through prostitution women are able to get extra resources; migration reduces the pressure on the scarce resources, thus offering some relief from hunger to those who stay, composed mostly of women, children, and the elderly), child abandonment and infanticide, at least in some cases, could favor boys at the expenses of girls (60). Various stories from different crises testify to maternal resilience and tell of mothers taking extreme actions that led to the survival of both mother and infant (61)(62)(63).…”

Anchors, Habitus, and Practices Besieged by War: Women and Gender in the Blockade of Leningrad

“…Skeptical male managers came to appreciate women's abilities and efforts (e.g., TsGAIPD SPb 4000/10/539/7). Unlike in other famines—when women's material well‐being worsened due to fewer economic rights (Maddox ; Sen , ; but see Edgerton‐Tarpley )—Leningrad women's rations improved as they took men's jobs. As they faced disorder and threats to survival, women came to perceive new worth of their efforts in homes and factories, as individuals and a collective (gendered) group (as I will show).…”