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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.
Price: $85.00
Pages: 472
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Series: Asia Pacific Modern
Publication Date:
05 August 2011
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520267701
Format: Hardcover
“A landmark in women’s history and the history of China.”
— James C. Scott
“Remarkable. . . . Hershatter has a complicated story to tell about women’s experiences in mid-twentieth-century China.”
“If you want to be reminded of how moving history can be, then read this book.”
“The Gender of Memory is not only a story of China’s past but a gift of restless questions for the present.”
— Ellen R. Judd
“Hershatter offers a breathtaking interrogation of her sources and methods, rendering elegantly transparent the thought processes behind her book’s production.”
“Arresting and engaging. . . . The Gender of Memory is a work of outstanding scholarship and significance.”
— Louise Edwards, The University of Hong Kong
“This book should be on the reading list of global historians interested in China.”
— Ellen R. Judd
Gail Hershatter is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of many books, including Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai and Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century, both from UC Press.