Chinese history: A useful category of gender analysis

American Historical Review

Volumn 113, Issue 5, 2008, Pages 1404-1421

  Hershatter, Gail ^a   Wang, Zheng ^b,c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b Department of Women's Studies ^*

^c UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 58849107710     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.113.5.1404     Document Type: Review

References (156)

1. Two important works on Chinese women's history published by scholars in Taiwan are Li Yu-ning and Zhang Yufa, eds., Zhongguo funü shi lunwen ji [Essays on Chinese Women's History] (Taipei, 1981),
2. and Li Yu-ning and Zhang Yufa, eds., Jindai Zhongguo nüquan yundong shiliao, 1842-1911 [Historical Materials on the Women's Rights Movement, 1842-1911], 2 vols. (Taipei, 1995).
3. See also the influential journal Jindai Zhongguo funü shi yanjiu/Research on Women in Modern Chinese History, published since 1993 by the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica, Taipei. Two recent articles in that journal survey the current state of women's history scholarship in Taiwan and the PRC/Hong Kong: Yu Chienming, "Shi buchong lishi yihuo gaixie lishi? Jin ershiwu nianlai Taiwan diqu de jindai Zhongguo yu Taiwan funü shi yanjiu" [Supplement to History or Rewriting of History?
4. Twenty-Five Years of Taiwan Research on Modern Chinese and Taiwanese Women's History], Jindai Zhongguo funü shi yanjiu/Research on Women in Modern Chinese History, no. 13 (December 2005): 65-103;
5. Hon-ming Yip [Ye Hanming], "Funü, xingbie ji qita: Jin ershi nian Zhongguo dalu he Xianggang de jindai Zhongguo funü shi yanjiu ji qi fazhan qianjing" [Women, Gender, and Other Matters: Twenty Years of China Mainland and Hong Kong Research on Modern Chinese Women's History and Its Prospects for Development], ibid., 107-163.
6. Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053-1075;
7. Margery Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford, Calif., 1972).
8. Important works from this body of literature, in order of publication date, include Marilyn B. Young, ed., Women in China: Studies in Social Change and Feminism (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1973);
9. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke, eds., Women in Chinese Society (Stanford, Calif., 1975);
10. Delia Davin, WomanWork: Women and the Party in Revolutionary China (Oxford, 1976);
11. Roxane Witke, Comrade Chiang Ch'ing (Boston, 1977);
12. Elisabeth J. Croll, Feminism and Socialism in China (1978; repr., New York, 1980);
13. Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ding Ling's Fiction: Ideology and Narrative in Modern Chinese Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1982);
14. Phyllis Andors, The Unfinished Liberation of Chinese Women, 1949-1980 (Bloomington, Ind., 1983);
15. Kay Ann Johnson, Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution in China (Chicago, 1983);
16. Judith Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China (Berkeley, Calif., 1983);
17. Kazuko Ono, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850-1950, ed. Joshua A. Fogel, trans. Kathryn Bernhardt et al. (Stanford, Calif., 1989);
18. Margery Wolf, Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China (Stanford, Calif., 1985);
19. Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s (Stanford, Calif., 1988).
20. Gail Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin (Stanford, Calif., 1986);
21. Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949 (Stanford, Calif., 1986);
22. Christina K. Gilmartin, "Gender, Politics, and Patriarchy in China: The Experiences of Early Women Communists, 1920-27," in Sonia Kruks, Rayna Rapp, and Marilyn B. Young, eds., Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism (New York, 1989), 82-105;
23. Patricia Stranahan, Yan'an Women and the Communist Party (Berkeley, Calif., 1983).
24. Christina K. Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White, eds., Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 1-2.
25. For a survey of more than 650 English-language works in history and the social sciences focusing on Chinese women in the long twentieth century alone-many of them influenced by Scott's mode of analysis - see Gail Hershatter, Women in China's Long Twentieth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 2007), http://repositories.cdlib.org/gaia/gaia-books/1 (accessed September 30, 2008).
26. Interested readers should also consult Tani Barlow, "The Direction of History and Women in China," Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no. 1 (Spring 2003), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal-of- colonialism-and-colonial-history/v004/4.1barlow.html (accessed September 30, 2008).
27. The literature on pre-twentieth-century gender is also extremely rich, and the selection of works mentioned in this essay should be understood as emblematic rather than exhaustive. This limited survey also necessarily neglects the ways in which scholarship has changed over the two decades in question, as the use of "gender" has become more common as well as more subtle with the accretion of a substantial body of scholarship. The analysis of masculinities, an important emergent topic regrettably not included here, is ably introduced in Susan Brownell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, eds., Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley, Calif., 2002);
28. the volume's introduction also surveys anthropological literature on gender in China, which is not covered extensively in this essay. On masculinities, see also the five articles in the AHR Forum "Gender and Manhood in Chinese History," American Historical Review 105, no. 5 (December 2000): 1599-1666.
29. Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley, Calif., 1993).
30. Christian de Pee, "The Ritual and Sexual Bodies of the Groom and the Bride in Ritual Manuals of the Sung Dynasty," in Harriet T. Zurndorfer, ed., Chinese Women in the Imperial Past: New Perspectives (Leiden, 1999), 53-100. Other essays in that volume also put "gender" to productive use.
31. Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford, Calif., 1994), 5.
32. For further exploration of representations by and of women in late imperial China, see Ellen Widmer and Kang-I Sun Chang, eds., Writing Women in Late Imperial China (Stanford, Calif., 1997).
33. Dorothy Ko, Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley, Calif., 2005).
34. Beverly Bossler, "Gender and Empire: A View from Yuan China," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34, no. 1 (2004): 197-223, quotations from 197 and 201.
35. Ibid.; Susan Mann, "Widows in the Kinship, Class, and Community Structures of Qing Dynasty China," Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 1 (1987): 37-56;
36. Mann, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, Calif., 1997).
37. Katherine Carlitz, "Desire, Danger, and the Body: Stories of Women's Virtue in Late Ming China," in Gilmartin, Hershatter, Rofel, and White, Engendering China, 101-122;
38. Carlitz, "Shrines, Governing-Class Identity, and the Cult of Widow Fidelity in Mid-Ming Jiangnan," Journal of Asian Studies 56, no. 3 (1997): 612-640;
39. Carlitz, "The Daughter, the Singing-Girl, and the Seduction of Suicide," Nan Nu: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 3, no. 1 (2001): 22-46.
40. This special issue of Nan Nu has been reprinted as Paul S. Ropp, Paola Zamperini, and Harriot T. Zurndorfer, eds., Passionate Women: Female Suicide in Late Imperial China (Leiden, 2001).
41. Janet Theiss, Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China (Berkeley, Calif., 2004).
42. Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, Calif., 1997).
43. For an important account of how changing medical theory and practice from the Song through the Qing shaped understandings of women as powerful, dangerous, and frail, see Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960-1665 (Berkeley, Calif., 1999).
44. Mann, Precious Records.
45. Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley, Calif., 2007).
46. Nanxiu Qian, "Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition: Women in the 1898 Reforms," Modern China 29, no. 4 (October 2003): 399-454;
47. Nanxiu Qian, "'Borrowing Foreign Mirrors and Candles to Illuminate Chinese Civilization': Xue Shaohui's Moral Vision in The Biographies of Foreign Women," in Grace S. Fong, Nanxiu Qian, and Harriet T. Zurndorfer, eds., Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Gender, Genre, and Cosmopolitanism in Late Qing China (Leiden, 2004), 60-101.
48. For a useful summary of the current scholarship on women at the turn of the twentieth century, see Susan Mann's "Introduction" in the same volume, 3-11.
49. Joan Judge, "Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalisms and Female Subjectivities in the Early Twentieth Century," American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 765-803;
50. Judge, "Citizens or Mothers of Citizens? Gender and the Meaning of Modern Chinese Citizenship," in Merle Goldman and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds., Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 23-43;
51. Judge, "Between Nei and Wai: Chinese Women Students in Japan in the Early Twentieth Century," in Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, eds., Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Lanham, Md., 2005), 121-143;
52. Judge, The Precious Raft of History (Stanford, Calif., 2008).
53. Paola Zamperini, "On Their Dress They Wore a Body: Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai," positions: east asia cultures critique 11, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 301-330;
54. Catherine Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850-1910 (Seattle, Wash., 2006).
55. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between East and West (Minneapolis, Minn., 1991);
56. Rebecca E. Karl, "'Slavery,' Citizenship, and Gender in Late Qing China's Global Context," in Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 212-244;
57. Hu Ying, "Naming the First 'New Woman,' " ibid., 180-211; Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley, Calif., 1997);
58. Christian Henriot, Belles de Shanghai: Prostitution et sexualité en Chine aux XIXe-XXe siècles [Beauties of Shanghai: Prostitution and Sexuality in China, Nineteenth to Twentieth Centuries] (Paris, 1997),
59. trans. Noël Castelino as Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History, 1849-1949 (Cambridge, 2001);
60. Tani Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham, N.C., 2004);
61. Christina Kelley Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s (Berkeley, Calif., 1995);
62. Weili Ye, Seeking Modernity in China's Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900-1927 (Stanford, Calif., 2001);
63. Antonia Finnane, "What Should Chinese Women Wear? A National Problem," Modern China 22, no. 2 (April 1996): 99-131;
64. Susan Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953 (Berkeley, Calif., 2003);
65. Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley, Calif., 2007);
66. Madeleine Yue Dong, "Unofficial History and Gender Boundary Crossing in the Early Chinese Republic: Shen Peizhen and Xiaofengxian," in Goodman and Larson, Gender in Motion, 169-187;
67. Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women's Suffrage in China (Stanford, Calif., 2007);
68. Bryna Goodman, "The New Woman Commits Suicide: The Press, Cultural Memory, and the New Republic," Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 1 (February 2005): 67-101;
69. Goodman, "The Vocational Woman and the Elusiveness of 'Personhood' in Early Republican China," in Goodman and Larson, Gender in Motion, 265-286;
70. Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (Berkeley, Calif., 1999).
71. Harriet Evans, Women and Sexuality in China: Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (London, 1997).
72. For Republican-era antecedents, see Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture, and Modernity in China (Honolulu, 1995).
73. Tina Mai Chen, "Female Icons, Feminist Iconography? Socialist Rhetoric and Women's Agency in 1950s China," Gender and History 15, no. 2 (August 2003): 268-295;
74. Gail Hershatter, "Local Meanings of Gender and Work in Rural Shaanxi in the 1950s," in Barbara Entwisle and Gail E. Henderson, eds., Re-Drawing Boundaries: Work, Households, and Gender in China (Berkeley, Calif., 2000), 79-96;
75. Emily Honig, "Iron Girls Revisited: Gender and the Politics of Work in the Cultural Revolution, 1966-76," ibid., 97-110;
76. Honig, "Maoist Mappings of Gender: Reassessing the Red Guards," in Brownell and Wasserstrom, Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities, 255-268;
77. Honig, "Socialist Sex: The Cultural Revolution Revisited," Modern China 29, no. 2 (April 2003): 143-175;
78. Harriet Evans, "The Language of Liberation: Gender and Jiefang in Early Chinese Communist Party Discourse," Intersections, no. 1 (September 1998), http://intersections.anu.edu.au/ issue1/harriet.html (accessed September 30, 2008),
79. reprinted in Jeffrey Wasserstrom, ed., Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches (London, 2003), 193-220;
80. Evans, "'Comrade Sisters': Gendered Bodies and Spaces," in Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, eds., Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution (Lanham, Md., 1999), 63-78;
81. Xueping Zhong, Wang Zheng, and Bai Di, Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era (New Brunswick, N.J., 2001).
82. Wolf, Revolution Postponed; Honig and Hershatter, Personal Voices;
83. Tamara Jacka, Women's Work in Rural China: Change and Continuity in an Era of Reform (Cambridge, 1997);
84. Jacka, Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (Armonk, N.Y., 2005).
85. Gail Hershatter, "Making the Visible Invisible: The Fate of 'the Private' in Revolutionary China," in Lü Fangshang, ed., Jindai Zhongguo de funü yu guojia (1600-1950) [Women and the Nation in Modern China (1600-1950)], vol. 1 of Wusheng zhi sheng [Voices amid Silence] (Taiwan, 2003), 257-281.
86. Harriet Evans, "Past, Perfect or Imperfect: Changing Images of the Ideal Wife," in Brownell and Wasserstrom, Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities, 335-360;
87. Evans, The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China (Lanham, Md., 2008),
88. Gail Hershatter, "Virtue at Work: Rural Shaanxi Women Remember the 1950s," in Goodman and Larson, Gender in Motion, 309-328;
89. Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley, Calif., 1999).
90. Wang Zheng, "Dilemmas of Inside Agitators: Chinese State Feminists in 1957," China Quarterly, no. 188 (December 2006): 913-932.
91. Neil J. Diamant, Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949-1968 (Berkeley, Calif., 2000).
92. Wang Zheng, "Feminist Activism in Contemporary China," in You-tien Hsing and Ching Kwan Lee, eds., Reclaiming Chinese Society: Politics of Redistribution, Recognition, and Representation (London, forthcoming).
93. Elisabeth Croll, Changing Identities of Chinese Women: Rhetoric, Experience and Self-Perception in Twentieth-Century China (Hong Kong, 1995);
94. Gail Hershatter, "The Gender of Memory: Rural Chinese Women and the 1950s," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1 (Fall 2002): 43-70.
95. One famous text of this period is Jin Tianhe's Nüjie zhong [The Women's Bell] (1903; repr., Shanghai, 2003), in which the male author laid out a blueprint to create modern women in order to transform China into a strong and prosperous modern civilization.
96. Chen Dongyuan, Zhongguo funü shenghuo shi [A History of the Lives of Chinese Women] (Shanghai, 1928).
97. Hu Wenkai, Lidai funü zhuzuo kao [A Survey of Women Writers through the Ages] (1957; repr., Shanghai, 1985).
98. In the wake of the Cultural Revolution, as the CCP began rewriting its own history as a means to reconstitute the party, the ACWF reactivated the project of a history of the Chinese women's movement as an important way to claim women's crucial role in the history of Chinese revolution. The other two mass organizations of the CCP, the Trade Union and the Youth Association, also began history projects on workers' and youth movements respectively.
99. Deng Yingchao, wife of the late premier Zhou Enlai and a senior party leader, lent her strong support to the project. Deng had been a renowned feminist activist in the May Fourth period before she joined the CCP in 1925. Throughout her long Communist career, she promoted women's rights and interests, either overtly or covertly. After the Cultural Revolution, Deng reached the peak of her political career, becoming a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CCP, vice-president of the National People's Congress, and president of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. An extremely cautious and tactful survivor of party politics, at this point she did not have to camouflage her strong concern for women's interests. Her support helped turn the women's history project into a nationwide campaign within the ACWF system. For a discussion of Deng's role in the early stage of the ACWF, see Wang Zheng, "'State Feminism?' Gender and Socialist State Formation in Maoist China," Feminist Studies 31, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 519-551.
100. The following volumes were edited and written by the Women's Movement History Research Office of the AWCF: Wusi shiqi funü wenti wenxuan [Selected Articles on Women's Problems in the May Fourth Era] (Beijing, 1981);
101. Zhongguo funü yundong lishi ziliao (1921-1927) [Historical Source Materials of the Chinese Women's Movement (1921-1927)] (Beijing, 1986);
102. Zhongguo funü yundong lishi ziliao (1840-1918) [Historical Source Materials of the Chinese Women's Movement (1840-1918)] (Beijing, 1991);
103. Zhongguo funü yundong lishi ziliao (1927-1937) [Historical Source Materials of the Chinese Women's Movement (1927-1937)] (Beijing, 1991);
104. Zhongguo funü yundong lishi ziliao (1937-1945) [Historical Source Materials of the Chinese Women's Movement (1937-1945)] (Beijing, 1991);
105. Zhongguo funü yundong lishi ziliao (1945-1949) [Historical Source Materials of the Chinese Women's Movement (1945-1949)] (Beijing, 1991);
106. and Zhongguo funü yundongshi [A History of the Chinese Women's Movement] (Beijing, 1989).
107. The Chinese Women Cadres School of the ACWF also edited two volumes of source materials from 1949 to 1983, Zhongguo funü yundong wenxuan ziliao huibian [An Anthology of Source Materials on the Chinese Women's Movement] (Beijing, 1988). The anthology is classified as an internal document, not for public circulation.
108. The published works included sections on nüquan yundong (the feminist movement) and prominent women activists prior to the ascendance of the CCP. Non-Communist women who had participated in a variety of women's movements were also asked to write their memoirs. Memoir writing more generally became a lively forum for political struggles in the 1980s, when the new CCP leadership began to clear the names of those wrongly accused of political crimes or errors in the Cultural Revolution and previous political campaigns. One important way for people who had been so labeled to fight against marginalization and erasure, or to stake a claim regarding their contribution to the Communist revolution or nationalist movements, was to write memoirs, autobiographies, or biographies. Many women joined this discursive struggle, which had no direct relationship to the ACWF's project.
109. Zheng Yongfu and Lu Meiyi conducted a survey of women's history in the post-Mao era, "Funü shi" [Women's History], which is collected in Zeng Yeying, Huang Chunsheng, and Xu Xiuli, eds., Wushi nian lai Zhongguo jindai shi yanjiu [Research on Modern Chinese History in the Past Fifty Years] (Shanghai, 2000), 382-428.
110. Aside from the works by the Women's Federation system, historians also produced several volumes on the history of the women's movement, including Liu Jucai, Zhongguo jindai funü yundong shi [A History of the Women's Movement in Modern China] (Beijing, 1989),
111. and Lu Meiyi and Zheng Yongfu, Zhongguo funü yundong, 1840-1921 [The Chinese Women's Movement, 1840-1921] (Zhengzhou, 1990).
112. Mary Beth Norton, "Women's History and Feminism in China Today: A Report from Peking University," Journal of Women's History 1, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 109.
113. In an excellent review essay, Hong Kong-based historian Hon-ming Yip notes the continuity of this concentration on the history of women's movements well into the twenty-first century. See Hon-ming Yip, "Funü, xingbie ji qita."
114. A few male historians started to teach and write about women's history in the early 1980s. One of them, Rong Tiesheng, was a mentor to Lu and Zheng, co-authors of two of the very few histories of women in modern China: Lu Meiyi and Zheng Yongfu, Zhongguo funü yundong;
115. and Zheng Yongfu and Lu Meiyi, Jindai Zhongguo funü shenghuo [A History of Women's Life in Modern China] (Zhengzhou, 1993). The latter is a pioneering work on the social history of women.
116. The other major work on women in modern China that departs from political history is Luo Suwen, Nüxing yu jindai Zhongguo shehui [Women and Modern Chinese Society] (Shanghai, 1996).
117. See Hon-ming Yip, "Funü, xingbie ji qita," and Zheng Yongfu and Lu Meiyi, "Funü shi," for detailed discussions of major works on women in modern China. Li Yu-ning and Zhang Yufa, Jindai Zhongguo nüquan yundong shiliao, was a major source of material for mainland historians working on the modern period.
118. For a detailed discussion of the rise of research on women in the 1980s, see Wang Zheng, "Research on Women in Contemporary China," in Gail Hershatter et al., eds., Guide to Women's Studies in China (Berkeley, Calif., 1999), 1-43.
119. Li Xiaojiang, Xiawa de tansuo [The Exploration of Eve] (Zhengzhou, 1988), 32.
120. The series includes the following works on women's history: Zheng Huisheng, Shanggu huaxia funü yu hunyin [Chinese Women and Marriage in Antiquity] (Zhengzhou, 1988);
121. Du Fangqin, Nüxing guannian de yanbian [Transformations of the Concept of Women] (Zhengzhou, 1988);
122. Lu Meiyi and Zheng Yongfu, Zhongguo funü yundong;
123. and Zheng Yongfu and Lu Meiyi, Jindai Zhongguo funü shenghuo.
124. In the early 1990s, Li Xiaojiang also started a large oral history project and compiled a four-volume series of women's life stories collected by women scholars in different parts of China. Li Xiaojiang, ed., 20 shiji Zhongguo: Funü koushu shi congshu [Twentieth-Century China: A Series of Women's Oral Histories], vol. 1: Rang nüren ziji shuohua: Wenhua xunzong [Let Women Themselves Talk: Cultural Diversity];
125. vol. 2: Rang nüren ziji shuohua: Minzu xushi [Let Women Themselves Talk: Ethnic Stories];
126. vol. 3: Rang nüren ziji shuohua: Qinli zhanzheng [Let Women Themselves Talk: War Experiences];
127. and vol. 4: Rang nüren ziji shuohua: Duli de licheng [Let Women Themselves Talk: The Road to Independence] (Beijing, 2003).
128. At a workshop on women's and gender history in 2000, Gao Shiyu highlighted the continuing intellectual constraints on mainstream Chinese historians: "Empirical historiography as the basis, plus a Marxist and Leninist framework, has formed a fixed paradigm that has become a new norm that historians have followed. If you don't write history this way, editors will not accept your work, as they will not consider it academic." Gao Shiyu, "Funü shi: Dui chuantong shixue de jiejian yu chaoyue" [Women's History: Learning from and Transcending the Traditional Historiography], in Du Fangqin, ed., "Yinru shehui xingbie, shixue fazhan xin qushi" [Introducing Gender: New Trends in Historiography] (unpublished conference proceedings, 2000).
129. See debates and discussions at faculty training workshops in 1999 and 2000 recorded in two volumes compiled as unpublished conference proceedings: Cai Yiping, Wang Zheng, and Du Fangqin, eds., "Fu lishi yanjiu yi shehui xingbie" [Engendering the Study of History] (1999); and Du Fangqin, "Yinru shehui xingbie."
130. Yang Nianqun, "Meiguo Zhongguo xue yanjiu de fanshi zhuanbian yu Zhongguo shi yanjiu de xianshi chujing" [The Paradigm Shift in China Studies in the U.S. and the Current State of Chinese History], Qingshi yanjiu [Studies in Qing History], no. 4 (November 2000): 65-76.
131. Du Fangqin, "Cong shehui xingbie shijiao yanjiu Zhongguo lishi: Geren jingyan" [Studying Chinese History from a Gender Perspective: A Personal Experience], in Du Fangqin, ed., Funü xue he funü shi de bentu tansuo [Local Exploration of Women's Studies and Women's History] (Tianjin, 2002), 183-199.
132. This workshop on "Chinese Women and Development-Status, Health, and Employment" was hosted by the Center for Women's Studies at Tianjin Normal University, and was funded by the Ford Foundation. Six members of the CSWS joined more than one hundred women scholars from different parts of China, many of them key players in the emergent field of women's studies or renowned scholars on women's issues.
133. Sharon K. Hom and Xin Chunying, eds., English-Chinese Lexicon of Women and Law (Beijing, 1995);
134. Bao Xiaolan, ed., Xifang nüxing zhuyi yanjiu pingjie [An Introduction to Western Feminist Studies] (Beijing, 1995);
135. Wang Zheng, Nüxing de jueqi: Dangdai Meiguo nüquan yundong [The Rise of Women: The Contemporary Feminist Movement in the United States] (Beijing, 1995).
136. Li Yinhe, Lin Chun, and Tan Shen, eds., Funü: Zui manchang de geming [Women: The Longest Revolution] (Beijing, 1997).
137. Wang Zheng and Du Fangqin, eds., Shehui xingbie yanjiu xuanyi [Selected Works on Gender Studies] (Beijing, 1998).
138. The concept entered circulation in China through Caroline O. N. Moser's article "Gender Planning in the Third World: Meeting Practical and Strategic Needs," World Development, no. 17 (November 1989): 1799-1825,
139. translated in Wang Zheng and Du Fangqin, Shehui xingbie yanjiu xuanyi.
140. The Ford Foundation's decision to sponsor a large feminist academic project was not made suddenly or in isolation. Feminists inside and outside China had worked closely for years to convince the Ford Foundation of the importance of women's and gender studies curriculum development in China. The unsuccessful earlier attempts in this regard affected the orientation of the CSWS in the 1990s and made it focus more on activism in gender and development.
141. Several important studies on gendered historical topics have been published by scholars from religious studies, anthropology, literature, and sociology. See, for instance, Shui Jingjun and Maria Jaschok, Zhongguo qingzhen nüsi shi [A History of Muslim Women's Mosques in China] (Beijing, 2002);
142. Xia Xiaohong, Wan Qing nüxing yu jindai Zhongguo [Women in the Late Qing Dynasty and Modern China] (Beijing, 2004);
143. Huang Yufu, Jingju, Qiao he Zhongguo de xingbie guanxi (1902-1937) [Chinese Gender Relations as Seen through Qiao in Peking Opera (1902-1937)] (Beijing, 1998).
144. Major works on women's history in premodern China include Gao Shiyu, Tangdai funü [Women in the Tang Dynasty] (Xian, 1988),
145. and Ding Yizhuang, Manzu de funü shenghuo yu hunyin zhidu yanjiu [Manchu Women's Lives and Marriage Institutions] (Beijing, 1999).
146. According to Gao Shiyu, a historian of women in medieval China and a former editor of the prestigious journal Lishi yanjiu [Historical Research], until 1998 the journal had never published on women's history. From 1998 to 2000, when she was editor, the journal published four articles on women.
147. Du Fangqin and Wang Zheng, eds., Zhongguo lishi zhong de funü yu xingbie [Women and Gender in Chinese History] (Tianjin, 2004).
148. Gao Shiyu, in her discussion titled "Development and Perplexity," maps out major intellectual concerns of Chinese historians facing unfamiliar theories from the West. Shixue lilun yanjiu [Research on Historiography], no. 3 (2004): 97-107.
149. Lin Xiaofang, "Shehui xingbie lilun yu Zhongguo funü shi yanjiu" [Gender Theory and Chinese Women's History], Gannan shifan xueyuan xuebao [Journal of Gannan Teachers College], no. 2 (2006): 73-76.
150. Li Xiaojiang is the most vocal scholarly advocate of this view. Li Xiaojiang, "Wushinian, women zoudao nali?" [How Far Have We Come in Fifty Years?], Zhejiangxuekan [Zhejiang Academic Journal] 1 (2000): 59-65;
151. Li Xiaojiang, ed., Wenhua, jiaoyu yu xingbie [Culture, Education, and Sex] (Nanjing, 2002).
152. See Wang Zheng, Lydia Liu, and Dorothy Ko, "Cong 'nüjie zhong' dao 'nanjie zhong': Nanxing zhuti, guozu zhuyi yu. xiandaixing" [From 'Women's Bell' to 'Men's Bell': Male Subjectivity, Nationalism, and Modernity], in Shehui xingbie [Gender Studies], vol. 2, ed. Du Fangqin and Wang Zheng (Tianjin, 2004), 32-58;
153. Song Shaopeng, "Minzu zhuyi yu nüquan zhuyi: Jindai minzu guojia guannian de jiangou yu nüxing geti guomin shenfen de queli" [Nationalism and Feminism: The Construction of the Concept of a Modern Nation-State and the Establishment of the Identity of Female Citizen], in Shehui xingbie [Gender Studies], vol. 3, ed. Du Fangqin (Tianjin, 2006), 125-151.
154. A recent special issue of the journal Gender and History titled Translating Feminisms in China, edited by Dorothy Ko and Wang Zheng, also presents critical examinations of both nationalism and feminism in Chinese history; Gender and History 18, no. 3 (November 2006).
155. Hon-ming Yip, in "Funü, xingbie ji qita," astutely assesses both the current state of efforts to develop gender history and the potential of gender history to transform the large field of Chinese history.
156. A recent series of translated works on women and gender in the China field, edited by Beijing University literature professor Liu Dong, has helped to make Anglophone feminist historical work more widely available to historians in China. Gender historians at the University of Michigan are collaborating with historians at Fudan University on setting up a Ph.D. program with a focus on gender history.