Adoption

Out-adoption as a solution to the problem of too many children faded very quickly in Taiwan with the advent of reliable contraception and abortion in

[17] For a particularly horrible example, see Gary Hamilton, "Patriarchalism in Imperial China and Western Europe: A Revision of Weber's Sociology of Dominance," Theory and Society 13, no. 3 (1988): 393-425.

[18] Infanticide, direct or indirect, and the selling of kinfolk were, of course, well known in many other societies. Their commonplace occurrence in China in recent times leaves a deeper mark on present-day society than parallel but obsolete practices do on Euro-American culture.

[19] See Mary Erbaugh, "Chinese Women Face Increased Discrimination," Off Our Backs 20, no. 3 (Mar. 1990): 9, 33, for a recent and well-informed summary of this problem in China. Simon Long (Guardian , February 2, 1990) reported the freeing in 1989 of more than 7,000 women and children in Sichuan as part of a national campaign against kidnapping, slave-trading, and bride-selling. Poor regions in Sichuan are especially notorious for this.

[20] In addition to the child offered to me by the laundry-keeper, I occasionally hear of such sales in the course of fieldwork. Twin boys had just been sold by a Taibei couple on welfare whom I interviewed in 1985, for example.

the 1960s. While we lack comparable data for China as a whole, I encountered only a few cases of adoption in or out in the Chengdu sample among women who came to childbearing years after the mid 1960s, when contraception and abortion became available to those who wanted them. It is instructive, therefore, to consult the conclusions from Taiwan household-register data drawn by Arthur P. Wolf and Huang Chieh-shan about precontraception adoption.

As a part of a marriage form in which infant girls were fostered by their future parents-in-law, adoption was extremely frequent in northern Taiwan from at least eighty years prior to 1930, when such "minor marriages" radically diminished. For some time, approximately 70 percent of girls were adopted out shortly after birth.^[21] Seeking to account for the timing in a woman's childbearing career of decisions to adopt girl children, Wolf and Huang found that the work load of care for previously born children was important in determining whether a newly born girl would be kept as a daughter or adopted out as some other family's foster daughter-in-law.^[22]

Such very high rates of adoption were unevenly distributed in China, being found mostly in southeastern regions,^[23] and were far from universal. But adoption of girls was widely practiced and probably very frequent throughout China. Demand for girls as daughters, daughters-in-law, servants, and apprentice prostitutes ensured that families that did not choose to abandon superfluous children, or dared not do so, could dispose of them easily in, or under the guise of, adoption.^[24] While much diminished, such practices are known, discussed, and part of the experience of many living women.