Law and Public Opinion in Republican China

FAIN: FA-51457-05

Kathryn Bernhardt
UCLA; Regents of the University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA 90024-4201)

This book will examine the issue of women's self-determination in love and sex in Republican China through an in-depth analysis of four headline-grabbing cases of the 1920s and 1930s and public reaction to them. Fascinating stories in themselves, the cases will be reconstructed in detail from archival court records, the diaries and letters of those involved, and newspaper and magazine accounts. They will be used to explore the ways in which the legal culture of the Republican period shaped public debates about women, love, and sex in a modernizing China and the influence that those public debates in turn had on the changing legal culture.