Spanning the century from the Taiping Rebellion through the establishment of the People's Republic of China, this is the first comprehensive history of women in modern China. Its scope is broad, encompassing political, economic, military, and cultural history, and drawing upon Chinese and Japanese sources untapped by Western scholars. The book presents new information on a wide range of topics: the impact of Western ideas on women, especially in education; the importance of women in the labor force; the relative independence enjoyed by some women textile workers; the struggle against footbinding; the influence of anarchism; the participation of a women's brigade in the Revolution of 1911; the role of women in the May Fourth Movement; the differences between the more assertive women of South China and the 'traditional' women of the North in organizing for political action; the involvement of peasant women in insurgency and anti-Japanese struggles in the countryside; and the effects of the Marriage Law of 1950. The author has contributed a new preface to this English edition, and Joshua A. Fogel and Susan Mann have written an introduction that places the book in the context of studies of Chinese women, Japanese sinology, and women's history in general. The book has extensive notes, a bibliography, and, as an appendix, a chronology of the history of women in modern China.

At the dawn of the 1930s a new empowered and liberated image of the female was taking root in popular culture in the West. This 'modern woman' archetype was also penetrating into Eastern cultures, however, challenging the Chinese and Japanese historical norm of the woman as homemaker, servant or geisha. Through a focus on the writings of the Western women who engaged with the Far East, and the Eastern writers and personalities who reacted to this new global gender communication by forming their own separate identities, Katrina Gulliver reveals the complex redefining of the self taking place in a crucial time of political and economic upheaval. Including an analysis of the work of Nobel Prize laureate Pearl S. Buck, The Modern Woman in China and Japan is an important contribution to gender studies and will appeal to historians and scholars of China and East Asia as well as to those studying Asian and American literature.

Making Women's Histories showcases the transformations that the intellectual and political production of women’s history has engendered across time and space. It considers the difference women’s and gender history has made to and within national fields of study, and to what extent the wider historiography has integrated this new knowledge. What are the accomplishments of women’s and gender history? What are its shortcomings? What is its future? The contributors discuss their discovery of women’s histories,the multiple turns the field has taken, and how place affected the course of this scholarship. Noted scholars of women’s and gender history, they stand atop such historiographically-defined vantage points as Tsarist Russia, the British Empire in Egypt and India, Qing-dynasty China, and the U.S. roiling through the 1960s. From these and other peaks they gaze out at the world around them, surveying trajectories in the creation of women’s histories in recent and distant pasts and envisioning their futures.

Men and Women in Qing China is an analysis of Chinese prescriptions of gender as represented in Cao Xueqin's famous eighteenth century Chinese novel of manners, The Red Chamber Dream or The Story of the Stone. Drawing on feminist literary critical methods it examines Qing notions of masculinity and femininity, including themes such as bisexuality, motherhood, virginity and purity, and gender and power. Its central aim is to challenge the common assumption that the novel represents some form of early Chinese feminism by examining the text in conjunction with historical data. The book will be especially important to those interested in issues of gender in China, the history of Chinese literary criticism and the application of feminist theory to the Asian text.

During the educational and social transformations in politically tumultuous early twentieth-century China, Chinese teacher's schools played a critical role. They were a force in the changes that swept Chinese society, bridging Chinese and Western ideals, empowering women, and contributing to rural modernization. This innovative account examines the social and political aspects and impacts of these schools, their role in a society in transistion, and their production of grassroots forces that lead to the Communist Revolution.

This book explores how the labour and leisure lives of people in contemporary rural China have been structured and transformed, discussing the changing dynamics of power relations both between and within genders, and in local (village and family/household) and remote (the state and market) contexts. It combines perspectives from sociology, gender studies, social history and demography to investigate the changes and continuities in the lives of women and men in Lianhe, a rural village in central China, examining the period from 1926 to 2013 through the lens of labour and leisure. Employing methods from the field of ethnography, the research focuses on the life stories of three generations, including 57 women in Lianhe. The book develops a ‘double comparison’ analytical framework to compare the organisation of labour and leisure in the three respective generations, proceeding, on the one hand, diachronically along the historical time, that is, the pre-collective era, collective era and reform era, and synchronically along the women’s life stages on the other. In so doing, the book links women’s shifting role in changing family/household forms with broader socio-economic, political, demographic and cultural changes. Moreover, it employs a holistic perspective to reflect changing patterns in women’s labour and leisure by disrupting the remunerated/unremunerated, home/labour, within/outside household and labour/leisure dichotomies, and exploring the interrelations between them. Based on this, the book then identifies the determinants of rural women’s labour and leisure and reveals the women’s experiences of their changing identities, particularly concerning their relationships with their parents (-in-law), sisters (-in-law), husbands and children. Particularly highlighting the interdependence and inequality among women, it also reveals their own perception of their identities and relationships, and their understanding of husband–wife fairness and gender equality. Lastly, it demonstrates that the prevalent androcentrism in the remote world does not match the increasing husband–wife fairness in the local world and argues that this mismatch has caused the complex and paradoxical experiences and subjectivities of these women. Given its scope, the book is of interest to scholars, students and researchers in the fields of sociology, anthropology, gender and development, as well as a general audience looking to explore contemporary rural China.

Gender and Education in China analyzes the significance, impact and nature of women's public education in China from its beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century. Educational change was an integral aspect of the early twentieth century state-building and modernizing reforms implemented by the Qing dynasty as a means of strengthening the foundations of dynastic rule and reinvigorating China's economy and society to ward off the threat of foreign imperialism. A significant feature of educational change during this period was the emergence of official and non-official schools for girls. Using primary evidence such as official documents, newspapers and journals, Paul Bailey analyzes the different rationales for women's education provided by officials, educators and reformers, and charts the course and practice of women's education describing how young women responded to the educational opportunities made available to them. Demonstrating how the representation of women and assumptions concerning their role in the household, society and polity underpinned subsequent gender discourses throughout the rest of the century, Gender and Education in China will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese history, gender studies, women's studies as well as an interest in the history of education.

This is the first volume in a series of three exploring modern Chinese theology. This volume covers "Mainland and Mainstream"--church theologians of mainland China who were predominantly associated with mainline or missionary-established denominations. In the post-1949 era of the People's Republic this translates into theologians and theological movements associated with the state-authorized church: the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association and the (Protestant) Three-Self Patriotic Movement. The volume is broadly chronological, with each Part forming a thematic unity. Part I covers "Republican and Wartime Theologies," with seven chapters exploring theologies of resistance, ethics, and themes of indigenization and Sinicization. Part II considers "Protestant Denominational Developments" in the first half of the twentieth century: the complex legacy of mission history in China and the relationship between denominational church belonging and theological development. Part III, "Reform Era Theologies and Methodological Considerations" begins in the height of the Maoist era, and addresses the changing relationship between Christian and Communist thought in the writings of TSPM theologians; the theological use of China's Christian past, and the development of Roman Catholic theological education in the twenty first century. The sixteen essays of the volume represent a new generation of critical voices from the mainland, Hong Kong, and North America. The volume opens up the critical questions that have galvanized the modern Chinese church--who are we, as Chinese Christians? How can our Christian faith serve the nation? What form should an indigenous church take?--and offers new perspectives for a contemporary audience.

Drawing from a broad array of literary, historical, dramatic and anecdotal sources, Yenna Wu makes a rich exploration of an unusually prominent theme in premodern Chinese prose fiction and drama: that of jealous and belligerent wives, or viragos, who dominate their husbands and abuse other women. Focusing on Chinese literary works from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, she presents many colorful perspectives on this type of aggression, reviewing early literary and historical examples of the phenomenon. Wu argues that although the various portraits of the virago often reveal the writers' insecurities about strong-willed women in general, the authors also satirize the kind of man whose behavioral patterns have been catalysts for female aggression. She also shows that, while the women in these works are to some extent male constructs designed to affirm the patriarchal system, various elements of these portraits constitute a subversive form of parody that casts a revealing light on the patriarchal hierarchy of premodern China.