Making the Private Public: Witnessing Female Infanticide in Nineteenth‐Century Kathiawar

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pashmina Murthy
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-150
Author(s):  
Ying-kit Chan

It seems obvious and trite to discuss female infanticide in China. Female infanticide has long been regarded as a product of backward cultural practices and gender inequities under an authoritarian, patriarchal regime bent on enacting and enforcing a “birth” sub-regime. Along with footbinding, female infanticide becomes a marker of traditional China’s decadent culture and regressive past. This perception of China is reinforced by first a single-child policy and then a prevalent desire to have even smaller, nuclear families in an increasingly affluent society, which have “amplified the effects of a long-standing societal preference for sons, derived from a traditional Confucian value system that still lingers in present form” (p.2).


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