The gender of memory : rural women and China's collective past / Gail Hershatter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hershatter, Gail.

Series:

Asia Pacific modern ; 8.

Asia Pacific modern ; 8

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rural women--China--Shaanxi Sheng--Social conditions.

Rural women.

Rural women--China--Shaanxi Sheng--Economic conditions.

Socialism--China--Shaanxi Sheng--History.

Socialism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (481 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Rural women and China's collective past

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, c2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 1950's and 1960's. 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 1950's rural China and the present, Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.

Contents:

Frames

No one is home

Widow (or, the virtue of leadership)

Activist

Farmer

Midwife

Mother

Model

Laborer

Narrator.

Notes:

"A Philip E. Lilienthal book."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786613278517

9781283278515

1283278510

9780520950344

0520950348

OCLC:

739107920