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from Part I - Locality, marriage practice, and women
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
Not surprisingly, the verdict of Huachi County upset everyone, but it was Peng'er who responded most impetuously. In both her 1982 memoir and my 2005 interview with her, Feng Zhiqin (aka Feng Peng'er; for her name change, see Chapter 7) confirmed that in spite of her bound feet, she walked about eighty li (about twenty-four miles) in two days to Qingyang, where the prefectural civic center was located, and met with Prefect Ma Xiwu. Ma listened to her petition and showed great sympathy. Ma defined Peng'er's case as an example of “feudal marriage” that should be eradicated. Ma then promised Peng'er that he would look at her case carefully and indeed visited Peng'er's village several days later. They met again when Peng'er was working under a mulberry tree, where Ma encountered her on his way into the village.
Superficially, Peng'er's story looks like a typical communist textbook case, in which a brave woman, guided by the communist idea of freedom of marriage, dared to challenge the old patriarchal authority and fight against an arranged marriage. As in the “Gold Flower Story,” in which a woman was liberated from an unhappy marriage and an abusive husband with the help of the CCP government, Peng'er's case was used by many communist authors as a persuasive example of how the CCP liberated women from traditional family and patriarchal oppression. It seems also to be a case that confirmed the May Fourth discourse about women resisting the oppression of the patriarchal family. On the other hand, although some American scholars since the 1980s have challenged the CCP's official version of its role in fighting for women's rights, this case also does not seem to support their hypothesis that the CCP sacrificed women's rights in exchange for male peasants’ support, as argued in the Introduction and Chapter 1.
In her 1982 memoir, Feng Zhiqin revealed the motive behind her appeal: she felt dreadful about the situation because as a result of the county's verdict, “my family members (qin ren 亲人) were put in jail and my good marriage was destroyed.” She never mentioned any resentment toward her father.
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