訴訟關係文章を通してみた淸代社會における女性

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to examine what kind of incidents and disputes in which woman appeared as victims, perpetrators, or simply persons concerned in archives of lawsuits, and then to use these findings to consider the situation of woman in Qing society. The first section briefly surveys legal provisions concerning lawsuits involving women. The second section indicates the numbers and trends of items concerning woman in the four groups of source materials on lawsuits used in this paper, the Ba county archive, the Huizhou archive, the Taihuting (Liminfu) archive, and the Shuntianfu archive. The third section examines disputes concerning inheritance, family property, troubles between husbands and wives, as well as cases in which a mother or mother-in-law took a problem son to court, cases concerning tenancy and debt, and cases in which a wife went to court on behalf of her husband. These lawsuits involving women varied widely from serious cases to daily affairs of a routine nature. During this period lawsuits brought by women were restricted, but in fact women frequently went to court and their suits were accepted. Although the lineage system and its control was strong, in cases concerning inheritance and family property, this fact often became a cause of, rather than solution to, disputes. The fourth section attempts to show regional differences seen in the lawsuits involving the trade in woman. In Ba county, the abduction and trade in woman was remarkably frequent and systematic. The section shows that this may have been caused by population flows, in other words, there were historically both massive inflows and outflows of people in Ba county, while on the other hand, the people of Huizhou mainly worked outside their home territory.