The women came from different villages, converging outside the local Rural Affairs Bureau shortly after 10am. One had taken the morning off from her job selling rice rolls. Another was a tour operator. Yet another was a recent retiree.

The group, nine in all, double-checked their paperwork, then strode in. In a dimly lit office, they cornered three officials and demanded to know why they had been excluded from government payouts, worth tens of thousands of dollars, that were supposed to go to each villager.

“I had these rights at birth. Why did I suddenly lose them?” one woman asked.

That was the question uniting these women in Guangdong Province, in southern China. They were joining a growing number of rural women, all across the country, who are finding each other to confront a longstanding custom of denying them land rights — all because of whom they had married.

In much of rural China, if a woman marries someone from outside her village, she becomes a “married-out woman”. To the village, she is no longer a member, even if she continues to live there.

That means the village assembly — a decision-making body technically open to all adults, but usually dominated by men — can deny her village-sponsored benefits such as health insurance, as well as money that is awarded to residents when the government takes over their land. (A man remains eligible no matter whom he marries.)

Now, women are fighting back, in a rare bright spot for women’s rights and civil society. They are filing lawsuits and petitioning officials, energised by the conviction that they should be treated more fairly, and by the government’s increasing recognition of their rights.

In doing so, they are challenging centuries of tradition that have defined women as appendages to men: their fathers before marriage, their husbands after. That view has persisted even as the country has rapidly modernised, and women have gone to school and sometimes even become their families’ breadwinners.

They are also exposing a gap between the ruling Communist Party’s words and its actions. Many courts, which are controlled by the party, refuse to take on the women’s lawsuits. Even when women win favourable rulings, local officials have refused to implement them, fearing social unrest. Women have been harassed, beaten or detained for pursuing their rights in these cases.

Not long after a colleague and I met the Guangdong women and accompanied them to the rural affairs bureau, several told us they had been contacted by officials or would no longer be able to participate in this article. The Times is identifying the women only by their family names and omitting their exact location for safety reasons.

Often, married-out women staking claims are simply dismissed. Inside the Guangdong rural affairs office, which oversees land payouts, a middle-aged male official in a blue polo shirt tried to shoo the women away.

“This is your own village’s problem, not our problem,” he said. When the women accused the government of ignoring their plight, he warned: “Don’t talk nonsense.”

One woman shot back: “How can you leave it entirely to the village? Then what are you all for?”

Chinese women have long suffered discrimination, but the financial implications of that inequality came into sharper view after the Chinese economy’s breakneck expansion.

As China embraced market reforms starting in the 1980s, the government began taking over rural land for factories, railways and shopping centres. In exchange, villagers received compensation, often in the form of new apartments or certificates entitling them to dividends from the land’s future use.

The government mandated that female village members be given equal compensation. But it left the definition of “members” to the male-led village assemblies. And to many of those assemblies, one group didn’t qualify: married-out women.

It is unclear how many women have been denied land rights because of marriage, but the number has grown as the population has become more mobile, with people marrying across provinces, not just villages. Government-backed surveys indicate that as many as 80 per cent of rural women — hundreds of millions of people — are not listed on their villages’ land documents. That makes it hard for them to defend their claims if disputes arise, such as if they marry outsiders.

For decades, women in this situation had little recourse. Some accepted their deprivation as normal. But there are signs of a quiet resistance unfolding as women have become more educated and found more ways to connect with one another. The number of court rulings involving the words “married-out women” jumped to nearly 5,000 five years ago from 450 in 2013, according to official data.

New York Times News Service