A traditional Chinese saying goes, "Married daughters are the water splashed out," meaning in a patriarchal system, a married woman is the property of her husband's family and has nothing to do with her parents' family. Old biases die hard. The same old maxim is plaguing women farmers in the country who are "married out" to a man not from the village. The reason is the woman will bear offspring who will carry the husbands' family name rather than the family name of her village.

This is what has happened to five women in Tongcheng City of central Anhui Province. In recent years, urbanization has led to the conversion of large tracts of land to non-agricultural uses in the village located in the suburbs of the city. When the village committee distributed the compensation for land, they skipped five women who had started families with men from outside the village. When the second batch of compensation was due to be distributed and the five women found that their names were still missing from the list, they petitioned governments at different levels, but to no avail. They were about to give up hope when they were promised free legal aid by the Peking University Center for Women's Law & Legal Services.

Li Ying, the attorney for the case, recalled that back in 2005 women farmers losing land-related interests owing to marriage with men from other villages was becoming an issue of national concern. She decided to take up the case to set a legal precedent for women facing similar problems. "This case mirrored our center's common difficulty in filing litigation for the disadvantaged: the case is easily won but the enforcement of the ruling is too strenuous and requires a lot of work out of court," said Li Ying.

She filed a lawsuit in the Tongcheng Court representing the five victimized women on June 16, 2005. At the trial on August 3, the defendant, the head of the village committee, made a ferocious rebuttal. "Every nation and every clan has its rules; according to the rules of our clan, land will never be given to married-out daughters," he thundered. The committee rallied more than 100 villagers, including relatives of these women, who scolded and cursed these women for their "irrational demands." Some family members even swore that they would sever their relations.

Despite the ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, on the very evening these women won their case, they burst into tears in the hotel room of their lawyer late into the night. Getting the compensation also turned out to be a rough ride. The women finally summoned the courage to apply to court for coercive enforcement only under the encouragement of their lawyer Li Ying. They eventually got the money this April, eight months after winning the lawsuit.