The Intellectual Partnership between spouses in the 20th century

2002 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

• Project/Area Number: 13610432
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Asian history
• Research Institution: NAGOYA UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN STUDIES
• Principal Investigator: NISHIKAWA Mako NAGOYA UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN STUDIES FOREIGN LANGUAGES associate professor, 外国語学部, 助教授 (80319384)
• Project Period (FY): 2001 – 2002
• Keywords: Liang Sicheng / Lin Huiving / Qian Zhongshu / YangJiang / Hushi / Jiang Dongxiu / Mao Zedong / the Cultural Revolution

Research Abstract

Historically in Chinese society it has been thought that, in general, women should not be highly educated. Yet since the establishment of the Republic of China there have been many notable married couples in which both husband and wife were highly educated and both engaged in intellectual pursuits, couples such as Sun Yat-sen (Sun Wen) and Song Qingling, Zhou Enlai and Deng Yingchao, Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin. In the case of Hu Shi, the bride chosen for him by his mother had received only the traditional training reserved for women, so he insisted that she expand her knowledge and improve her mind. This demand amongst the intelligentsia for a spouse with a high degree of intellectual curiosity has continued unchanged. The recently deceased Qian Zhongshu and his wife Yang Jiang were both renowned literary scholars who continued to pursue their own writing while engaging in scholastic research.
The existence of such marriages among intellectuals as these seems to run against the dictum that highly educated women were not desirable in Chinese society. When contrasted with contemporary Japanese conceptions of the marriage relationship, the uniqueness of the Chinese situation becomes even more clearly evident.
Why did this type of intellectual partnership between spouses arise in republican China? In this paper I review the late Qing and Republican debates among the intelligentsia over the nature of the family and spousal relations, examine middle-class views of the family, and look into the intellectual parity of spouses in the homes of the intelligentsia and the contributions of intellect and education to family stability, with special reference to the examples of Hu Shi and his wife Jiang Dongxiu, Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, and Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang.