Women in China's Long Twentieth Century (Global, Area, and International Archive)

171 Pages·2007·0.76 MB·English

by  Gail Hershatter

Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century
The Global, Area, and International Archive (GAIA) is an initiative
of International and Area Studies, University of California, Berkeley,
in partnership with the University of California Press, the California
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© 2007 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hershatter, Gail.
Women in China’s long twentieth century / Gail Hershatter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978–0-520-09856-5 (pbk.: alk. paper),
isbn-10: 0–520-09856-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Women—China—Social conditions—20th century.
2. Women—Employment—China. 3. Sex role—China.
4. Women and communism—China. 5. Feminism—China.
I. University of California, Berkeley. Global, Area, and International
Archive. II. Title.
HQ1767.H47 2007
305.40951'0904—dc22 2006029808
Manufactured in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
ansi/nisoz39.48–1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Women in China’s Long
Twentieth Century
Gail Hershatter
Global, Area, and International Archive
University of California Press
Berkeley los Angeles London
For Grace

Contents
Introduction
1
1. Marriage, Family, Sexuality,
and Gender Difference
7
2. Labor
51
3. National Modernity
79
Afterthoughts 107
Works Cited 119
Index 157

Introduction
The study of women in twentieth-century China has expanded so quickly
since the mid-1980s that a state-of-the-field survey becomes outdated in the
time it takes to assemble and write one. This burgeoning area of inquiry
draws its inspiration and approaches from many sources outside “the China
field,” a realm no longer hermetically sealed within exclusive logics of sinol-
ogy or area studies. Research about Chinese women has been enriched by
the growth of women’s studies abroad and in China; by debates about gen-
der as a category of analysis and its uneasy relationship to sex and sexual-
ity; by conversations inside established scholarly disciplines about gender’s
entanglement with politics, migration, nation building, and modernity; by
discussions across the disciplines about agency, resistance, subjectivity, and
voice; and by several waves of refigured Marxism in the wake of feminist
activity, socialism’s demise, and the development of postcolonial scholar-
ship. During the same period, China’s reform and opening have changed the
conditions for scholarly work by both foreign and Chinese scholars. Gender
has appeared at the center of new debates in the Chinese press, within the
state, and among emergent groups such as women’s studies scholars, social
workers, legal experts, and labor analysts. Available sources and opportuni-
ties for research and fieldwork in China have expanded for both Chinese
scholars and foreigners, giving rise to scholarly conversations that some-
times intersect and sometimes trace utterly separate trajectories.
To complicate this endeavor further, writing about women routinely
crosses disciplinary boundaries. For China, the disciplines that investigate
“women” shift with the period of time under investigation as well as with
changing disciplinary norms. Historians, for instance, used to stop at the
edge of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, at which point the pursuit
of knowledge was handed over to social scientists. Now historians often
1