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This chapter outlines the major historical aspects of women's activism during the British colonial period (1843–1997) and the emergence of feminist politics in the lead up to governance under the PRC (1997–present), with an overview of major figures, organizations, campaigns, and strategies. In Hong Kong, women have always been absent in the political arena and leadership positions–during the British colonial period, they were excluded from positions of governance and, in the lead up to sovereignty under the PRC, their views were not solicited in the organizing of social movements. The historical accounts of women's movements and the narratives of women activists suggest the purposeful development of a women-driven and women-centered critique, initiated by elite expatriate and Chinese women and, thereafter, embraced by local Chinese women's groups. In the development of a discrete space for women's organizing, feminism as a frame is continuously being constituted, contested, reproduced, and displaced by other frames during the course of mobilization. The socio-cultural, economic, and political context is important in shaping the various frames in terms of the ideas they incorporate and articulate. These frames also compete in an uneven playing field with asymmetrical power relations and unequal resources.

This chapter discusses the degree to which common law marriage can find its origins in Roman family law, whether the Roman concepts can contribute to explaining the legal structure of common law marriage, and whether there is anything to learn from the Roman experiences in the enactment of cohabitation legislation. Of particular interest with respect to the formless relationships in Roman family law is the usus marriage, the free Roman marriage, and concubinage.

This chapter discusses informal marriages under canon law. It considers the influence of Roman law, and traces the evolution of canon law understanding of marriage from the Middle Ages to the Council of Trent in 1563, when the Roman Catholic branch decreed that entering into a marriage through a church wedding ceremony was an unconditional prerequisite for the validity of the marriage. The canon law concept of concubinage and the reasons behind the church's efforts to legally regulate the marital relationship are discussed.

This chapter examines irregular and clandestine marriages in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. The period between 1560 and 1640 stands out as a period of exceptional cultural discipline when it comes to marriage. Moral, social, legal, and religious pressures brought all but the most marginal or the most reckless into line and into church. The Elizabethan and early Stuart regimes were highly successful in enforcing their opposition against concubinage and unlawful cohabitation. The most extreme sectarians who preferred civil over ecclesiastical marriage had their way only briefly in the 1650s.

The chapter discusses the voice of Islamic piety on miscegenation. There are no bars to racial intermarriage. There are no racial and inferior races. This was a concern that arose from the legal doctrine Kafa'a which translates to equality of birth and social status in marriage. It ensures that a man should be a social equal of the woman he marries. It does not forbid unequal marriages. It aims to protect the honor of respectable families and to stop unsuitable marriages. It is determined by a number of factors: wealth, profession, freedom, Islam and descent. There is evidence that marriages of black men with white women were frowned upon. However, marriage was one thing, concubinage another. Muslim men who owned women slaves were accustomed to mate with them. A man could recognize his offspring by his slave woman as legitimate, conferring a formal legal status on both mother and child.

Offering a narrative case study of two families in colonial Jamaica, the Taylors/Tailyours and the Johnstons, chapter 4 shows how customary practice and personal whim regulated the illicit unions between white men and enslaved women. White men’s personal desires and circumstances, rather than the law, shaped the treatment and future prospects of illegitimate mixed offspring born of slavery’s sexual economy—at the individual level and beyond. The descendants of enslaved African women and British men, even those elite few who achieved freedom and white male patronage, held little control over their lives, professional prospects, or racial identities.

This chapter discusses the phenomenon of elite polygyny. It also contains a section on living together in arrangements that were not deemed formal marriages, and there is a brief discussion on Jewish and Muslim relations. Gradual acceptance of emotional ties of love and affection as a binding force in relationships may have helped to reduce the elite polygyny. Elite women supported by clergy raised concerns about elite polygyny. Below the level of the elite it remains extraordinarily difficult to identify who was formally married, in the sense of having been through a process of contract, exchange of wealth, and potentially a blessing. There are glimpses of ‘living together’ arrangements, which to all intents and purposes were stable monogamous sexual relationships even though they were never recognized as marriage by canon law.

This chapter traces the evolution of the French female emigration movement launched at the turn of the century. According to its supporters, sending women overseas could solve myriad social and political ills plaguing both the metropole and the colonies: their presence would lead to the establishment of French families in the empire, thereby ensuring the colons’ permanent settlement; it would also bring relief to the nation’s depopulation crisis, and an “outlet” to the “redundant” metropolitan single women who could make good marriage partners to French settlers, thus ending the problem of interracial concubinage. The second part of the chapter surveys two separate initiatives to jump start the female emigration movement: the Société française d’émigration des femmes, created by the Union coloniale to recruit female emigrants; and the Oeuvre coloniale des femmes françaises whose mission was to provide assistance to French women heading to the empire.

This chapter focuses on the communities of female hereditary performers themselves. Drawing on evidence from colonial ethnographies as well as from contemporary fieldwork, it begins by outlining the structure of female hereditary performers as one of interrelated networks of tribes and communities that stretch across North India. The chapter then turns to the post-independence history of selected communities of female public/erotic performers. It shows that it was after independence that some communities of female performers became involved in sex work rather than performing arts and that for those that continued to be performers, it is since the 1990s in particular that life has apparently become most difficult, with a livelihood from performing almost impossible, especially after the closure of the dance bars in Mumbai in 2005. During this time, many vernacular traditions have involved more sexualised performance and/or more harassment for performers, and a more illicit status. Many performers have become more reliant on sexual transaction, with the older systems of long-term concubinage breaking down.

The chapter examines all three parties involved in concubinage: Church, clerics, and women. With the help of letters written by concubines themselves or by their relatives and friends, it investigates the self-perception of these women and how they saw their position in society. In addition, attention is given to the clerics accused of concubinage and their behaviour towards the ecclesiastical authorities. Finally, the role of the Church in this process is considered; in particular, the chapter explains the reasons that lay behind the Church’s battle against concubinage and what measures were taken to end it.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this global trade network was the creation of pirate settlements “from below,” by Euro-American pirates and local Malagasy allies. The main pirate settlement of St. Maries was a fascinating outpost on the fringes of both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. While piracy and slaving were the central economic activities, this chapter examines the social and cultural aspects of this community and demonstrates that this outpost, in fact, was well connected with the North American colonies. The settlers maintained many social, cultural, and legal norms, including religious practices. At the same time, the infusion of the local Malagasy culture produced the formidable Betsimisaraka foundation, a unique blending of Euro-American-Malagasy society and culture. Chapter 5 traces the precarious balance among various factions that eventually led not only to massacre and desertion but also to rebirth and ethnogenesis. The island of Madagascar itself, on the doorsill between the Atlantic and the western Indian Ocean, became a dominant subject of colonial discourse, not only as a potential utopian settlement, but also as a source of slaves beyond metropolitan monopoly controls.

Chapter 3 discusses developments in public policy and intellectual attitudes towards prostitution and sexual immorality in early modern Italy. It shows how attempts were made to discipline courtesans and repress concubinage, which were both regarded as greater menaces to good order, marriage and the social hierarchy than was the ordinary prostitute who kept her place. Official brothels fell out of favour and the registration and taxation of prostitutes became more haphazard, though vice districts stayed and were somewhat erratically maintained. Trenchant criticisms were made of the notion that prostitution was a defensible ‘lesser evil’ capable of preserving the public good; in some quarters it was seen as an enemy of marriage and demographic growth, as a stimulus to irresponsible lust rather than a device for controlling it. But writers still defended the regulation rather than the repression of prostitution, even in the face of venereal disease.

This chapter explores the sexual exploitation of slavery and enslaved women’s feelings towards children born of rape and concubinage and their reactions to the white fathers of their children. A white man who sold his own offspring likely sold his daughters into the sex trade, underscoring how deeply imbedded rape was in the market economy and in the role of white planters as fathers.The act of rape connected the private realm of the southern home to the market. Sexual exploitation complicated identity and family formation in the slave South and could strengthen children’s identification with their enslaved mothers, or in the rare cases when white men offered preferential treatment to their mixed-race children, could erase Black mothers.