Biography:

Stephanie Painter is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Chicago exploring the intersection of gender, sexuality, law, and women’s history in Qing China (1644-1912). Her research reclaims violence as an instrument of women’s power. She approaches the testimonies of women on trial for husband-murder as an untapped site for reconstructing non-elite women’s emotional, material, and working lives.

Dissertation:  Women’s Violent Crime and a Crisis of Weak Patriarchy in Late Imperial China

My dissertation draws upon over 500 capital crime reports known as Qing Board of Punishments memorials (xingke tiben) located in the First Historical Archives in Beijing about women sentenced to death for killing their husbands. These women ranged in age from teenage newlyweds to grandmothers over fifty and resided throughout the Qing Empire, including among the Manchu, Miao, Hui, and Zhuang ethnic minorities. Their defiance, as evident in the vivid and often counterintuitive testimonies they gave in court, grants us access to an unknown realm of generational experience of patriarchy, and allows me to argue that we have underestimated the role of ordinary, non-elite women’s emotional lives in shaping Qing society. Whether it be a young girl’s refusal to abandon hope of creating a life with the boy she had loved since youth, a mother working to safeguard herself and her children from a uncaring and economically inept husband, or an aged wife acting upon her sexual desire for a man half her age, these women’s stories compel a re-envisioning of traditional Chinese womanhood centered on the ‘Chinese Woman’ as resisters to and manipulators of what I call “weak patriarchy,” a concept that challenges our assumptions about the male-dominated household.