Gail Hershatter

In the past decade, as prostitution once again has become a recognized feature of Chinese society, it has been incorporated into a larger public discussion about what kind of modernity China should seek and what kind of sex and gender arrangements should characterize that modernity. Prostitutes, like every other non-elite group, did not record their own lives.

Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai

Dangerous Pleasures

Emphasizes time between 1950s and 1970s in rural southern and central Shanxi province.

Rural Women and China’s Collective Past

The Gender of Memory

This indispensable guide for students of both Chinese and women’s history synthesizes recent research on women in twentieth-century China. Written by a leading historian of China, it surveys more than 650 scholarly works, discussing Chinese women in the context of marriage, family, sexuality, labor, and national modernity. In the process, Hershatter offers keen analytic insights and judgments about the works themselves and the evolution of related academic fields. The result is both a practical bibliographic tool and a thoughtful reflection on how we approach the past.

Women in China's Long Twentieth Century

What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group—rural women—at the center of the inquiry? In this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these women’s life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter 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. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues, important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power, difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present, Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.

This is the story of the workers of Tianjin (Tientsin) and how, in the first half of the 20th century, they helped shape Tianjin's identity as the major industrial centre of North China. This text should be of interest to students of the period covered, and also to those students of Communist China who wish to understand the antecedents of China's current urban society and trace the roots of powerful continuities. The book offers a wealth of detail on material life, forms of entertainment, local festivals and individual rites of passage and makes use of studies of the local economy carried out by contemporaries and in the People's Republic. The Workers of Tianjin is a contribution to both Chinese labour history and urban history.

The Workers of Tianjin, 1900-1949

农村妇女和中国集体化历史

记忆的性别

“An important and much-needed introduction to this rich and fast-growing field. Hershatter has handled a daunting task with aplomb.” —Susan L. Glosser, author of Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915–1953

Lisa Rofel

Tyrene White

Christina K. Gilmartin

This first significant collection of essays on women in China in more than two decades captures a pivotal moment in a cross-cultural--and interdisciplinary--dialogue. For the first time, the voices of China-based scholars are heard alongside scholars positioned in the United States. The distinguished contributors to this volume are of different generations, hold citizenship in different countries, and were trained in different disciplines, but all embrace the shared project of mapping gender in China and making power-laden relationships visible. The essays take up gender issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Chapters focus on learned women in the eighteenth century, the changing status of contemporary village women, sexuality and reproduction, prostitution, women's consciousness, women's writing, the gendering of work, and images of women in contemporary Chinese fiction. Some of the liveliest disagreements over the usefulness of western feminist theory and scholarship on China take place between Chinese working in China and Chinese in temporary or longtime diaspora. Engendering China will appeal to a broad academic spectrum, including scholars of Asian studies, critical theory, feminist studies, cultural studies, and policy studies.

Women, Culture, and the State

Engendering China

This collection of essays on women in China captures a pivotal moment in a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary dialogue. For the first time, the voice of China-based scholars are heard alongside scholars positioned in the United States.

Using gender as its analytic lens, this deeply knowledgeable text illuminates the places where the Big History of China’s past two centuries intersects with the daily lives of ordinary people. Based on formidable scholarship, Gail Hershatter’s beautifully written book will be essential reading for all students of China’s modern history.

Gail Hershatter

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