Cost and Confucian Values: Selling Women in China

A tally of the human inventory processed between 1922 and 1924 by the widow of a north warlord commander indicates that girls under the age of twelve typically cost at least twice as much as their brothers. Forty years earlier, during the final decades of the Qing dynasty, a new concubine could set status-hungry literati back as much as several hundred taels. Countless texts written by social reformers bemoan women’s place on the lowest rung of a strict traditional Confucian hierarchy. But, if women were held in such low esteem, why were they (sometimes) so expensive? This paper examines paradoxes in the market for women in. In doing so, the paper considers the wide variety of contexts into which a woman could be sold, and the diverse contractual arrangements that might surround her purchase or lease. Court cases from the period both just before and immediately after the fall of the Qing dynasty suggest that within the interstices of these various positions, a woman was occasionally able to shape her circumstances – leveraging her value against the demands of her new position, whether that be that of concubine, laborer, surrogate mother, or wife.