Angelina Chin's Bound to Emancipate explains how social and political changes during the early decades of the twentieth century affected understandings of lower-class laboring women in Chinese society. It provides a compelling story of the ways that political elites, reformers, and intellectuals (be they colonial or Chinese nationalists) framed the debate about the place of working women in Hong Kong and the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. The situation is very different for each, as one is a colonial city and the other a center of Chinese nationalism – at least up until the late 1920s. Chin shows that emancipation narratives are important in defining women's lives, particularly with regard to the right to work and personal freedoms. But the “bound” aspect of women's place is most powerfully conveyed here, particularly in terms of how intellectuals, the media, and social and political leaders portrayed, controlled, and limited lower-class working women.
This book makes an important contribution to the field of Chinese women's history because it provides a new perspective on lower-class women's experiences in Guangzhou in the 1920s and the 1930s which is juxtaposed with their histories in a similar period of Hong Kong's colonial history. Furthermore, Chin frames and analyzes a coherent and understudied category – women service laborers – who are clearly distinct from the elite educated women, rural peasants, and urban industrial laborers more often studied. How urban elites understood and categorized lower-class women and the connections between these understandings and proper citizenship is also an important aspect of the work.
Chin deals primarily with four categories of laborers. Much attention is focused on mui tsai, household bondservants or child brides, in Hong Kong. These young female laborers were sold to their employers, usually by their desperately poor families in rural south China, and in return for their work they received food and shelter and some eventually earned their freedom. We also learn about nüling, tea-house singers, and nü zhaodai, waitresses, who served in tea-houses, restaurants, and opium dens in Guangzhou. Both groups became increasingly visible public figures in the 1920s. Prostitutes are discussed in the context of both Guangzhou and Hong Kong. A fifth group, blind tea-house singers (guji) is also discussed, but in much less detail than women in the other categories. All share several characteristics. They are lower-class, mostly single, women with very little, if any, education, and whose occupations were increasingly regulated by the state.
Chin argues that women in these categories were at times portrayed as uncivilized, immoral, or incapable of self-emancipation, and their work was often sexualized and stigmatized. Their “emancipation” was limited by categorization of their work and by ideas of social propriety. At certain moments and in specific locales women were deemed more or less worthy of emancipation because of their place on what Chin calls a “spectrum of commodified charity and women's sexualized labor” (p. 12). Young, disabled laborers, such as mui tsai and blind singers, were at one end of spectrum and prostitutes at the other. Tea-house waitresses and singers were considered, at times, suspect because they used sexualized deportment and appearance to earn their living.
We learn most about elite attitudes toward mui tsai and prostitutes in Hong Kong. Chin carefully delineates the elite in Hong Kong, including local Chinese elites and progressive colonials, who took up the issue of helping mui tsai or solving the problem of prostitution, pushed for systems of regulation, and advocated the return of victimized or fallen women to respectable womanhood, if possible. Archival material from the Po Leung Kuk (PLK), the Society for the Protection of Women and Children, founded to rescue mui tsai and destitute women, is used to show how lower-class women were categorized. Rich testimonies from PLK case files of relief recipients and witnesses in the 1930s shows how lower-class women interpreted and responded to categories of good or depraved womanhood. At times they also claimed qualities such as victimhood or chastity to improve their condition. Revolutionary ideas of emancipation (including from the shackles of the family) were not part of efforts to free women from bound status or sexual labor. Instead, Chinese elites, like PLK members who also worked with the colonial state, attempted to expand social control, to reinforce their power as a social class, and to establish the parameters of suitable Hong Kong citizenship.
Understanding of lower-class women in Guangzhou was more focused on discussions of emancipation. In the 1920s Guangdong women were seen to be enslaved by feudal customs, fengsu, which included mui tsai and prostitution, and political leaders increased legislation accordingly. Chin curiously includes in her discussion of fengsu reform, efforts to end breast binding, a reform goal and legislative effort which was surely emancipatory but not only targeted at lower-class women. All women were urged to unbind their breasts, usually for the sake of improved maternal health and to create a modern nation with “unshackled women”. Chin posits that these efforts to reform customs were important parts of liberation politics in 1910s and 1920s Guangzhou, but they soon gave way to increased social control. By the beginning of the 1930s, there was a radical shift away from eliminating bad customs to protecting good morality. Guangdong elites were no longer interested in emancipating women from restrictive circumstances, but were rather concerned with what Chin calls a more conservative trend of policing morality, particularly those of lower-class working women, including waitresses and singers. Unsurprisingly, prostitutes, particularly unlicensed women, were seen as a particular threat to urbanites’ morality and a target of even greater social control and regulation.
An increased visibility of a new category of female service laborers, such as tea-house workers, was partly what led to new efforts to protect morality. Images of waitresses and tea-house singers in the popular press became more sexualized, as these workers’ livelihood often depended on such factors as their physical allure, ability to flirt, and modern attire. At the same time that elites questioned the morality of waitresses and singers in Guangzhou, those laborers pushed for their own emancipation, for their right to work, through labor organization and manipulation of images of themselves. Waitresses successfully fought for legislation which mandated that tea-houses ensure that at least 20 per cent of their employed service staff be women. This victory was a double-edged sword, Chin explains. More tea-houses did employ women, and women did change their public identities, but the state also stepped up their regulation of occupational identities available to and acceptable for women.
Chin's work thus illuminates the different understandings of emancipation as they relate to lower-class women laborers in two very different contexts, colonial Hong Kong and nationalist Guangzhou. Two chapters (on PLK testimonies and the organizational efforts of tea-house workers) provide some sense of how lower-class women understood “emancipation”. However, those voices are highly mediated, showing yet again the practical difficulties in writing the social history of largely illiterate populations. This might have been overcome, to some extent, by more attention to the processes of migration between the two regions, or more of the laborers’ background, such as the conditions of poverty in rural south China that drove families to bond daughters or women themselves to seek service work. There is very little flavor here of how laboring women might have seen migrating to cities as providing greater economic opportunity, and hence a degree of liberation. The book most clearly shows how ideas of emancipation, freedom, relief, and charity are applied to the understanding of lower-class women's identity by others, such as reformers, politicians, and intellectuals. Chin's work is an excellent reminder that Chinese elite feminist projects of emancipation may not always have held meaning for laboring women, but narratives of emancipation, be they bodily, national, or feminist emancipation, did have an impact on their lives.
The book successfully explicates how lower-class women were, in some historical moments, more bound by the state and the elite ideas of morality than liberated by modern concepts of emancipation. In Hong Kong, for example, the PLK as an elite institution took steps to deport lower-class women who did not meet standards of correct womanhood. Guangzhou authorities policed morality and sanctioned those who were seen as being morally deviant at the same time that women's right to work was upheld. Chin explains the enduring, and limiting, role of social conventions and public morality in the processes of emancipating Chinese women, and reminds readers that emancipation is not a linear process toward greater freedom. And while lower-class women did gain a measure of emancipation, such as freedom from bondage and greater opportunities for work in the service sector, they continued to be constrained by moral expectations for dress, sexuality, and acceptable public behavior.
