Books by Gail Hershatter

Using gender as its analytic lens, this deeply knowledgeable text illuminates the places where the Big History of China's past two centuries intersects with the daily lives of ordinary people. Based on formidable scholarship, Gail Hershatter's beautifully written book will be essential reading for all students of China's modern history.

This collection of essays on women in China captures a pivotal moment in a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary dialogue, examining gender issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Topics covered include learned women in the 18th century, sexuality, women's consciousness, and literature.

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