Journal Article

Foreword

Hershatter, Gail

2020

Overview

Almost half a century has passed since Anglophone feminist scholars began to write about women in China's twentieth-century revolutions (Young 1973; Wolf and Witke 1975; Davin 1976; Croll 1978). Their inquiry quickly expanded beyond iconic images of women unbinding their feet, taking up the pen or the spear, and sallying forth to claim their place in a revolutionary modernity. Calling into question the late Qing/May Fourth images of Chinese women as sequestered and ignorant, scholars have examined the history of educated women and restored accounts of women's visible and invisible labour to late imperial and Republican history. They have explored the symbolic work that gender performed in passionate discussions about China's place in a world of predatory imperialist powers. They have posed questions about the Communist Party's conceptualisation of gender equality and the effects of Mao-era socialist construction on gendered life. And they have attempted to broaden their research beyond the events of high politics, asking how the understanding of social change would shift if viewed through the analytic lens of gender. These questions have generated a large body of scholarship, greatly enriched in recent decades by the work of gender scholars writing in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese mainland. All the while, China has been changing in a fast-moving and unevenly enacted process of economic reform, inspiring new questions and explorations across the disciplines of history, anthropology, sociology, literary and visual studies, politics, and of course gender studies. And yet, stubborn silences endure, some of them perhaps permanently. It remains difficult to grasp what happened when the everyday of gendered labour and social relations met the circulation of norms and imperatives for what women should do and be. How did a practice such as footbinding, once a part of the everyday, become a shameful form of child abuse, not just in the writings of intellectuals but in the memories of footbound women? How did the Maoist exhortation that \"women can hold up half the sky\" come to be a personally meaningful statement, a component of some women's sense of self? How, and for whom, did the changing symbolic language of gender come to infuse women's consciousness of their own capabilities, of what they might be expected to become or be admired for becoming, and how did this process affect individual and social identifications and desires?

• Publisher: CEFC
• Subject: 20th century / Anglophones / Anthropology / Asian cultural groups / Child abuse & neglect / Communism / Communist parties / Consciousness / Economic reform / Equality / Feminism / Footbinding / Gender / Gender inequality / Gender relations / Gender studies / Han Han / History / Intellectuals / Interpersonal relations / Labor / Maoism / Masculinity / Memories / Modernity / Politics / Professionals / Questions / Revolutions / Self concept / Social change / Social relations / Socialism / Socialist parties / Sociology / Transnationalism / Women