The “self-combing women” were a special group of women who appeared mainly in the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They performed the “self-combing ceremony” when they came of age, promising not to marry for life and to live by working with their hands. Most of them came from poor families, and in order to escape the fate of forced marriages, arranged marriages, and even concubinage, they chose to take control of their own lives by “not marrying”.
In the course of my research, I made a special trip to Shunde, Guangdong Province, to conduct a field study on the “Bingyu Tang”, the only remaining self-combing woman in the area. This is one of the last remaining communal living spaces for self-combing women in the area, and is now open to the public as a cultural heritage site. Walking through the narrow courtyard and simple rooms, I tried to imagine how those women, who refused to marry, relied on each other and lived together in those times. The objects and photographs at the site, the vows recorded on the stone tablets, and the ancestral hall tablets dedicated to them made me feel a silent but resolute power – a group of women who were not blessed but insisted on standing on their own.
“Bingyu Tang”, where the self- combing women lived.
There were also some women working in the silk reeling factories at that time. At that time, the reeling factory prevalent female workers, but there is a set of implicit, unwritten rules: “dating do not want, married do not want.” In order to get a job and make ends meet, they had to give up the possibility of emotion and marriage, and chose to become “neutralized” self-combers. In that kind of social structure, job opportunities, family reputation, and women’s living space are all based on the premise that they have “withdrawn from the marriage system”.
However, even if they voluntarily worked for a living, under the patriarchal clan system of the time, self-combing women were still excluded from the system. Most cruelly, they had no place to be buried even after their death. Because they did not have husbands, they could not be buried in their husbands’ families; and as self-combers, it was also difficult for them to be accepted by their fathers’ families into their ancestral shrines. They neither belonged to their families of origin nor could they be “accommodated” by their male families, as if their existence had been systematically erased from birth to death.
This is not a romantic non-marriage, but a heavy struggle. The self-combing woman spent her life fighting against the narrative of marriage as the only place for women. This history also provides a very important cultural mirror for us to rethink “whether marriage is necessary” today.
Leave a Reply