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What role have women played in the history of modern China? What is the relationship between women and men in China since the late Qing dynasty and how does that affect our interpretations of China’ long twentieth Century? This course examines modern and contemporary Chinese history through the lens of women and gender. The history of modern China was a political history written by reformers, revolutionists and left-wing intellectuals; a cultural history of booming publishing houses and education institutions; a social history of professionals, workers, beggars and refugees. While men were the leaders throughout, women were also an important part. Examining women in history of twentieth-century China is thus another perspective to view general political and social change as well as everyday life of ordinary people in Chinese society. The course will introduce students to historical periods central to women in different classes, area and marital status. The discussion of primary sources, such as newspapers, magazines, memoirs, photographs and posters will allow participants to gain familiarity with different kinds of primary sources including printed and oral, textual and visual, and with the theories and methodologies relevant to studying this history.
There are 8 chapters in this book. Topics examined include lives and roles of women in pre-twentieth-century China, women’s role in the early twentieth-century nationalist and revolutionary movement as activists, publicists and suffragists, discourses of the new woman from the 1910s to the 1930s, women’s issues as a central plank in political propaganda during the 1920s and 1930s, women’s contribution in the city and countryside before 1949, women’s role in the social and economic transformations as well as political movements in the 1950s and 1960s, and women’s role in the Post-Mao Era.
This book studies of gender relations in the Lower Yangzi region during the High Qing era. This book uses literature and writings of the elite, and broadens the scope to include women’s work in the farm household, courtesan entertainment, and women’s participation in ritual observances and religion. After an introductory chapter that evaluates the historiography of Chinese women, the book surveys High Qing history, charts the female life course, and discusses women’s place in writing and learning, in entertainment, at work, and in religious practice. The concluding chapter returns to broad historiographic questions about where women figure in space and time and why women cannot be ignored when writing histories.
This book studies state policy, ideas about the physical body, and notions of sexuality and difference in China’s recent history, from medicine to the theater to the gay bar and from law to art and sports. Part One focuses on the government and its relationship to gender and sexuality, with a focus on the family. Part Two shifts the focus to individual persons and their bodies. Part Three shifts to consider questions about fantasy, modernity, and globalization, defined in sexualized and gendered terms. This book shows how changes in attitudes toward sex and gender in China during the twentieth century have cast light on the process of becoming modern.
This book provides a complete and thorough introduction to the Chinese history and culture. It is basically ordered chronologically, from the classical period to the People’s Republic. A hundred source materials are selected, and topics covered include religion and cosmology; Confucianism; government; history writing and historical genre; contacts with outside peoples; family, kinship, an gender; local social and economic activities; upper class and intellectuals; tales and fiction. Setting the standard for supplementary texts in Chinese history courses, this expanded edition includes coverage of personal documents, social records, laws, and previously ignored reports.
This book is an anthology of women writing in modern China in English translation. It collects the literary works composed by eighteen writers, including Qin Jin, Chen Xiefen, Chen Hengzhe, Feng Yuanjun, Shi Pingmei, Lu Yin, Lu Jingqing, Chen Xuezhao, Ling Shuhua, Su Xuelin, Yuan Changying, Xie Bingying, Ding Ling, Chen Ying, Lin Huiyin, Bing Xin, Luo Shu, and Xiao Hong. The selected works cover fiction, drama, autobiography, essays and poetry. This book is a great source book in the study of gender, literature, and women’s writing in modern China.
This book presents Chinese women and their literary endeavor from the late Qing era to the eve of the Communist Revolution. Chapter One deals with the emergent moment of Chinese feminism and the women’s movement in the late Qing. Chapter Two explores the New Women writers including Lu Yin, Feng Yuanjun, Chen Xuezhao. Chapter Three turns to the fraught intersection between feminist sexual politics and leftist literary culture of the 1930s. Chapter Four explores the appearance of comic narrative strategies in works by Yang Jiang, Su Qing, and Zhang Ailing. Chapter Five concludes with a series of questions for future research.
After an overview of expectations for women as presented in the periodical press before going into the ideas of home economics education, the book examines the intellectual debates over what form women’s education should take; outlines views on the field of home economics itself; lays out the institutional configurations of the discipline of home economics; examines the particular way in which women were active in the expansion of state disciplinary power through wartime social education activities; shows how home economists managed post-Sino-Japanese War social reconstruction and the upheavals of the civil war; and explains the professional and political legacies of home economists after the establishment of the People’s Republic.
This book studies the woman question at the turn of the twentieth century. It examines the varied cultural and political uses of female biography, and evaluates how women’s issues continue to illuminate Chinese understandings of the past, the West, and the nation at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book is divided into three parts, concerned with feminine virtue, female talent, and heroism respectively. The regime of feminine virtue is integral to each of them. Part One examines tensions between private feminine virtues and new public female roles within the regime. Part Two and Three trace tensions between the regime and notions of female talent and female heroism respectively.
This book examines the educational and social transformations in early twentieth-century China. It focuses on the unique nature of Chinese teachers’ schools, and the critical role these schools played in the changes sweeping Chinese society. It also documents their role in the empowerment of women and the production of grassroots forces leading to the Communist Revolution. In the early twentieth century, female teachers’ schools provided a legitimate role for women as educators in the public domain for the first time. Women’s role in China’s education system after the 1911 Revolution and the influence on women’s education brought by the efforts made by Chinese educational reformers in 1922 are also examined.
This book studies the discourse and practice of public education for girls in China, from its beginning in the 1890s to the early 1920s. Using primary evidence such as government documents, newspapers, journals, and school readers, this book analyses the different rationales for women’s education provided by officials, educators, and reformers, examines how the project of women’s education became a major site around which larger issues of national and cultural identity, the purpose and meaning of modernizing change, and shifting notions of femininity were contested and reconfigured, and argues that a critical discourse on women indirectly provides a way of capturing the voices of female students themselves.
This book studies the history of women in the Shanghai cotton mills. It examines the development of working-class consciousness and participation in the labor movement among women mill hands through the distribution of male, female and child workers in Shanghai industries; the size and workforce of the cotton industry; the sexual division of labor in selected Shanghai mills; the extent of female workforce at Shen Xin Nine during the depression; comparison of wages for spinning and weaving; comparison of wages at different mills. It also describes how the traditional domestic exploitation of women complemented and reinforced the exploitation they experienced at work.
This book examines economic, social, political, and cultural changes as funneled through the teahouses of Chengdu during the first half of the twentieth century. It is divided into three parts. Part One focus on the teahouse itself, including its business, the Teahouse Guild’s role as liaison between the government and trade, and labor issues. Part Two shifts the focus from the teahouse to teahouse-goers. Part Three examines how social conflict and national and local politics influenced teahouses, teahouse life, and teahouse culture and how teahouses, as a public space, were controlled by the government and elite reformers.
This book investigates the lives of the urban poor in China in the early twentieth century. Chapter One examines how poverty emerged as a resonant concept for reforming elites in the early twentieth century. Chapter Two explores how the metaphor equating the nonworking poor with parasites became ingrained in sociological thinking. Chapter Three suggests that the Nationalist’s social engineering ambitions focused on creating a model capital in Nanjing by expunging social deviants. Chapter Four and Five examines the refugee crisis in both Shanghai and Beijing due to the outbreak of World War II in China, and shows how the Nationalist regime proved incapable of coping with increasing urban disorder.
This book explores changes in the lives of seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi Province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. The beginning chapter introduces the importance of place, the inadequacy of archives, the unpredictability of interviews, and the plasticity of memory. The subsequent chapters trace out positions that rural women have inhabited across their lifetimes: refugee, leader, activist, farmer, midwife, mother, model, laborer, narrator. The book shows how Party-state policy became local and personal and how it affected women’s agricultural work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting- even their notions of virtue and respectability.
This book features the work of 12 scholars in anthropology, film and literary studies. This book examines the positioning of women in domestic or public space in Chinese mass media and public discourse, as well as the representational spaces of women who struggles to broadening their spaces in the male-dominant world at the turn from the twentieth century to the twenty-first. The Transnational China comprises mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Chinese communities abroad. Sites of public sphere that are examined include women’s museum, women’s hotline, women’s sports, televisual fantasy, filmmaker’s work, feminist magazine, women’s bookstore, and women’s writing, public meetings and conferences, women’s movement and lesbian activism, etc.
This book explores the Chinese suffrage movement in detail within China’s own historical and political context. After an introductory chapter, the subsequent chapters trace a chronological path from the late imperial era when women were merely wives and daughters of subjects politically to the close of the 1940s when women’s right to participate in politics was unchallenged. The book shows that the radical social and political changes that women generated in China during the first half of the twentieth century have a lasting impact on women in the twenty-first century.
This book studies leading women writers in modern China, charting their literary works and life journeys to examine the politics and poetics of Chinese transcultural feminism that exceed the boundaries of bourgeois feminist selfhood. The central argument is that the new literary genres, styles, and tropes associated with women’s writing of these decades were that they actively enable the process of transformation they inscribed. After an introductory chapter, the book is organized in roughly chronological order as a series of case studies of individual or paired groups of women writers who are used to illustrate they ways in which women’s lives and literary practices mutually inform and alter each other.
This book tracks the Modern Girl as she emerged as a global phenomenon in the interwar period, analyzing her manifestations in Germany, Australia, China, Japan, France, India, the United States, Russia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. It demonstrates how the economic structures and cultural flows that shaped a particular form of modern femininity crossed national and imperial boundaries, and it highlights the gendered dynamics of interwar processes of racial formation, showing how images and ideas of the Modern Girl were used to shore up or critique nationalist and imperial agendas. The book consists of 14 collaborative and individually authored chapters, and concludes with 3 commentaries.
This book explores the attitudes toward work, marriage, society, and culture of three generations of women- those who entered the factory right around the socialist revolution in 1949, those who were youths during the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s, and those who have come of age in the Deng era- in a Chinese silk factory in the city of Hangzhou in eastern China. The book explores the multiple meanings of women’s liberation, argues that the project of modernity lives on in the practices of those who came of age with the Cultural Revolution, and traces state practices that encourage young women to achieve a natural feminine identity.
This book studies women in the May Fourth period, reconfiguring the history of the Chinese Enlightenment from a gender perspective and addressing the question how feminism engendered social change cross-culturally. Wang investigates the life stories of five Chinese women activists born in the initial decade of the twentieth century. They are Lu Lihua (born in 1900), a school principal; Zhu Su’e (born in 1901), an attorney; Wang Yiwei (born in 1905), an editor in chief; Chen Yongsheng (born in 1900), an educator; and Huang Dinghui (born in 1907), a career revolutionary. Their life stories constitute a portrait of women’s struggle towards national salvation and self-emancipation.
This book synthesizes recent research on women in twentieth-century China. It primarily concerns with other pairings that dominate writing on women in twentieth-century China: women and marriage, family, sexuality, and gender difference which centers on twentieth-century ethnographic and textual materials; women and labor which is largely organized around twentieth-century economic refigurings and political movements; women and national modernity, which is directly entangled with the grand revolutionary narrative. Having surveyed more than 650 scholarly works, Hershatter offers insight and judgments about the works themselves and the evolution of related academic fields.
