Mothers at the Crossroad: Gender-Generational Inequality during Republican China’s Legal Reforms

During Republican legal reforms, mothers at the intersection between gender and generational relations often found themselves stuck in less favorable situations during inheritance disputes with their sons. Such legal dynamic reveals a unique, historical ecology of Republican China’s legal reforms, yet it has gained less attention in the current scholarly discussion. Drawn from the local legal archives in Jiangjin County, Sichuan, this research studies how both changes and continuities of law led to such unique legal situations for mothers. Substantively, the 1930 Civil Code completely altered the gender dynamic of property rights and acknowledged women’s equal entitlement to property as men, which theoretically should empower female agency in property relations. However, in legal cases from the archives, mothers were often marginalized in inheritance distribution. When their husbands died, women, particularly adoptive mothers and stepmothers, gained much less share of property compared with their sons. Although mothers could have had more say on property distribution based on their senior authority, a more equalized generational relationship between parents and children, introduced by the new codes, undermined mothers’ previously favorable positions based on their age.

Thus, this research concludes that the coexistence of the new legal codes that introduced a more equalized pattern of generational relations, and the rigidity of existing gender norms that marginalized women in property ownership, created a unique local landscape of uneven implementation of Republican legal reforms, which leads to severer gender-generational inequality in inheritance distribution. With particular attention paid to the less studied group of mothers, this research contributes to the current field of legal history in modern China by focusing on the interactions between the fluidity of one’s position in generational relations and the relatively immutability of one’s gender role.