Gender and Chinese History is a collection of nine essays, originally presented at a research seminar held at the University of California, Davis, in 2010. Editor Bossler introduces these studies in an admittedly too brief overview of how attention to Chinese gender history has altered understanding of China, both in the past and present. The book's chronological range extends from the eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, and the topics of these studies vary, from a French representation of Qing-era Chinese weddings to memories of the first decades of the Communist gender regime. The contributors also differ in background: from well-known senior scholars to less-published junior academics. On the whole, the book reads well and the authors aim to bring something new to our comprehension of how Chinese male-female relations were perceived by contemporaneous persons and later observers.
The volume is divided into three sections in chronological order. The first part, “Early Modern Evolutions,” includes studies of an eighteenth-century French description of Chinese weddings (Ann Waltner), the interest of the well-known official Lan Dingyuan 藍鼎元 (1680–1733) in women's behavior (Guotong Li), the masculinity of a wealthy merchant, Wang Qishu 汪啟淑 (1728–98) (Yulian Wu), and the marriage of the eminent companionate couple Hao Yixing 郝懿行 (1757–1825) and his wife Wang Zhaoyuan 王照圓 (1763–1851) (Weijing Lu). The second section, “‘Cloistered Ladies’ to New Women,” deals with the transition from the late Qing to the early twentieth century. Ellen Widmer's contribution shows how already in the 1870s talented women were publishing their poetry in newspapers and literary supplements. Joan Judge's study looks at the lives and writings of three women from the same family and traces how their literary talents transcended from the writing of poetry into expository (and often political) prose; she also evaluates photographs of her subjects that lend insight into changing visions of ideal womanhood. Yan Wang's essay explores the fascinating life of Lady Zhuang 莊 (1866–1927), the wife of reformer-modernizer Sheng Xuanhuai 盛宣懷 (1844–1916), in Shanghai. The last section, “Radicalism and Ruptures,” takes the volume into both the Maoist and post-Mao reform periods. Emily Honig's investigation of the slogan “The times have changed” demonstrates the effect of propaganda on gender relations before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution. The final essay in the book by Gail Hershatter focuses on her interviews of two rural women, a mother and her middle-aged daughter, and juxtaposes their perceptions of female virtue during the last forty-five years of Communist rule.
The richness, complexity, and originality of these chapters are a tribute to the person who inspired these authors, and to whom this volume is dedicated, Susan Mann. The contributors are either her former students or her professional colleagues with whom she shared her path-breaking and influential research at meetings, conferences, and seminars. In her many publications Mann demonstrated the centrality of women to the Chinese historical record, and in particular how during the Qing period the execution of Chinese political power was gendered. The common theme in Mann's oeuvre is the dominance of the Chinese polity in its role as regulator of family, sexuality, and gender relations. Her argument that even twentieth-century changes, including those based on nationalist modernization and socialist liberation agendas which led women to seek education and employment outside the home, to choose their own marriage partners, and to enjoy the pleasures of urban culture, did not erode the authority of the state over women's lives. Mann also promoted the value of studying male homosocial relations and the changing presentations of Chinese masculinity.
With the exception of Waltner's chapter, which lends itself more to cultural history than Chinese gender history, each of the essays in this volume reverberates the ideas, themes, and premises of Mann's publications, including female virtue and work, women's education and writing, men and masculinity. The chapters by Li, Honig, and Hershatter direct attention to the relationship between conceptions of women's virtue and their labor. As Li shows, the Qing official Lan Dingyuan was just as keen as his late twentieth-century counterparts to promote the role of the state in the regulation and promotion of women's work, not only for their own self-advancement but also as a contribution to the well-being of Chinese society. Lan saw female labor as integral to his civilizing project, which brought Confucian values to the aboriginal culture of Taiwan. More than two centuries later, in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, Mao propagated the slogan “The times have changed,” which Honig convincingly argues became an indicator of shifting attitudes toward women's labor. From the early 1960s the government stopped proclaiming gender sameness, and started underlining the importance of women's responsibilities for the household, which ultimately meant women had to both engage in agricultural or industrial jobs and perform domestic duties. Hershatter scrutinizes the active presence of the PRC state at the village level and its transmission of proper female labor models for agricultural production. Her two rural-based mother-daughter interviewees from Shaanxi provide two different accounts of the meaning of the ideals of hard work and selflessness, those venerated during the 1950s and those of the current era of state-sponsored capitalism which prizes female skills in people management.
The second theme, women's education and writing, is prominent in the chapters by Lu, Widmer, Judge, and Wang. In these essays the authors indicate the multiple ways women utilized writing—including, poetry, political tracts, and family letters—to affirm their identities. Lu's portrayal of the female scholar Wang Zhaoyuan accentuates both her scholarly writing achievements, which were well known during her lifetime in the public domain, and her companionate marriage. Lu posits that the qing 情 (emotion) Wang expressed in the love poetry she wrote with her husband coupled with her assertive academic endeavors imply a marital relationship that defied the usual gender hierarchy. Widmer's study of the educated upper-class women who circulated their writings in the new public media of the 1870s demonstrates the slow beginning of a new forum for these individuals. She meticulously traces those individuals who first published in that decade and their struggle to bring their talents into the public arena and away from their cloistered lives, an effort that would also contribute eventually to the push for women's schooling. Judge focuses on the lives of three women from the same family whose adult lives spanned the years from the 1870s to the 1960s, and who experienced the transition from genteel ladies to New Women. The writings of these three “talented women” exemplify the changing cultural practices in which they and others transformed their talent to write classical poetry into their capacity to communicate in the media of journalism, fiction, and the visual arts. Nevertheless, as Judge emphasizes, whatever progress these women embodied, their achievements and those of others in the long term would be “violently denigrated in the name of serving the nation and the people” (151). Wang's subject, Lady Zhuang, is not a literary talent, but she is sufficiently educated to manage a complex household and later to run her husband's business enterprises, to handle large sums of money, to invest in commodity markets, and to build a vast network of social contacts enabling her to promote her business ventures. This chapter vividly reveals another dimension of Chinese women's historical transition from inner-quarter restrictions and responsibilities in the countryside during the late Qing to their engagement with the cosmopolitan commercial world of Shanghai in the early twentieth century.
The third theme which Mann encouraged scholars and students to investigate was masculinity and male-male relations. Wu's chapter on this topic focuses on the successful Qing Huizhou merchant Wang Qishu who spent his time and wealth attempting to demonstrate to literati his connoisseurship of seal collecting and his appreciation of women's poetry, which he encouraged through compiling and editing anthologies of their works. Wu argues that during the eighteenth century wealth became a new standard for masculinity, but even as she admits in her essay, riches were no substitute for the moral strength and rectitude associated exclusively with the scholar-literati. This is an intriguing study and one hopes that other scholars will pursue the resources of Huizhou archives to pursue similar biographical histories.
In sum, this volume attests to the progress that the study of Chinese gender has made in the last decades and the need to stimulate further research in this field. Gender and Chinese History: Transformative Encounters is an inspiring and innovative collection of well-researched and well-written studies, and therefore a fitting tribute to Susan Mann.
