Concubines in Public: The Rise of the Social Wife in Republican China

Moving beyond familiar narratives of abolition, Xia Shi introduces the contentious public presence of concubines in Republican China. Drawing on a rich variety of historical sources, Shi highlights the shifting social and educational backgrounds of concubines, showing how some served as public companions of elite men in China and on the international stage from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Shi also demonstrates how concubines' membership in progressive women's institutions was fiercely contested by China's early feminists, keen to liberate women from oppression, but uneasy with associating with women with such degraded social status. Bringing the largely forgotten stories of these women's lives to light, Shi argues for recognition of the pioneering roles concubines played as social wives, their impact on the development of gender politics, and on the changing relationship between the domestic and public for women during a transformative period of modern Chinese history.