Teaching Fellows (History)

Stephanie Painter explores the intersecting histories of women, gender, sex, crime, and resistance in Qing China. Turning to the extraordinary to unlock new possibilities for our understanding of the everyday, Painter's book project entitled, “What She Had, What She Wanted: Wifely Defiance in Late Imperial China,” reclaims violence as an instrument of women's power. Drawing upon hundreds of homicide reports (xingke tiben 刑科题本) preserved at the First Historical Archives of China in Beijing about wives sentenced to death for killing their husbands, Painter argues that historians have underestimated the role of ordinary, non-elite women’s emotional, material, and working lives in shaping early modern Chinese society. The impressions that these “female criminals (fanfu 犯婦)” left on the archive move scholarship beyond an image of women as collaborators in the reproduction of patriarchy, making it possible to see the ways women not only worked within, but also pushed against and broke through, this gender system.