This is taken from the materials list I sent around via email. I thought I'd put it on the blog, as well, and I've added in the book Roger mentioned yesterday (a conversation between two women who grew up in China during the Maoist years, one of whom stayed and one of whom moved to the U.S. in the post-Mao years).
Good books for teaching about
gender in Chinese history
RESOURCES FOR TEACHERS TO USE
THEMSELVES:
Ebrey’s Cambridge Illustrated History is good on gender, as is the East
Asia survey she wrote with Ann Walthall and James Palais.
This is a bit out of date
now, but still highly regarded and relatively short: Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850-1950, Stanford
University Press, 1989.
Susan Mann, Women’s and Gender History in Global
Perspective: East Asia, American Historical Association, Washington, D.C.,
1990; Gender and Sexuality in Modern
Chinese History, Cambridge University Press, 2011; The Talented Women of the Zhang Family. California, 2007 (this last
one is the one I mentioned in which Mann follows the model of Sima Qian,
commenting on the historical accounts she presents).
Barbara Ramusack and Sharon
Sievers, Women in Asia: Restoring Women
to History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
If you want to read some more
challenging theoretical works on gender in China, check out articles and books
by Gail Hershatter, Tani Barlow, Joan Judge, and Dorothy Ko. Hershatter’s book Dangerous Pleasures addresses the issue of the status of courtesans
and the transformation of sex work in the 20th century. Her most recent book is
based on many years of interviews with rural women who served as Communist
cadres in the 1950s and discusses how the Communist transformation of China was
experienced by them. Ko’s book Cinderella’s Sisters makes complex
arguments about the complex topic of foot-binding. Useful for teaching is Ko’s Every Step a Lotus, which is the
catalogue for an exhibition on shoes for bound feet put on by the Bata Shoe
museum in Toronto. Ko provided brief
essays about the history of foot-binding for it.
Ramya mentioned Matthew
Sommer’s book Sex, Law, and Society in
Late Imperial China (Stanford, 2002).
It’s not an easy read, but its thesis about why and how the Qing state
began policing women’s behavior more closely in the 18th century via the legal
system is very influential.
FICTION:
Dream of the Red Chamber, 18th century novel we discussed. I read a short version of this when I was in
high school. Thought it was weird! Appreciate it now….
Li Ruzhen, Flowers in the Mirror, University of
California Press, 1965. 19th-century novel that Roger mentioned in which an
alternate world dominated by women is featured.
Jennifer Anderson and Theresa
Munford, Chinese Women Writers, A
Collection of Short Stories by Chinese Women Writers in the 1920s & 30s.
China Books and Periodicals, 1985.
Pa Chin (Ba Jin), Family – of course!
BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS, AND
PRIMARY SOURCES:
Mann, Susan and Yu-yin Cheng,
eds. Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History.
University of California Press, 2001.
Excellent short translations of key texts that address issues of gender,
with good intros by leading scholars.
Janet Ng and Janice Wickeri, May Fourth Women Writers: Memoirs,
Renditions Press. 1997.
Hammond and Stapleton, eds. The Human Tradition in Modern China.
Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. One
chapter looks at the life of an 18th-century courtesan. My chapter examines a woman born in 1901 who
joined the Nationalist army in 1927 and then the German Communist Party in 1931
or so; she lived to the post-Mao era to tell about her difficult but
interesting life, including the hard years after 1949. Each chapter has a “suggested additional
reading” section.
Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and
Textual Histories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. A series
of portraits of prominent women active in 20th century China, based on
interviews and with analysis. Chapters
could be assigned to high school students.
Hua R. Lan and Vanessa L.
Fong, ed. Women in Republican China: A
Sourcebook, M.E. Sharpe, 1999). Lots
of excerpts of essays from the May Fourth period and after. Many big names and some that should be better
known.
On women who joined the
Communist army before 1949, see Helen Praeger Young’s Choosing Revolution: Chinese Women Soldiers on the Long March, University
of Illinois Press, 2001.
Zhong, Xueping, Wang Zheng,
and Bai Di, eds. Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era. Rutgers University Press, 2001. Eight or ten personal essays by US-based
academic women who grew up in Mao’s China. Many call into question the current
master narrative about the Cultural Revolution.
Ye Weili and Ma Xiaodong, Growing Up in The People's Republic:
Conversations between Two Daughters of China's Revolution, Palgrave
MacMillan, 2005. Roger mentioned this. It covers some of the same themes as Some of Us (above) in a very different format.
Brownell, Susan and Jeffrey
N. Wasserstrom, ed. Chinese
Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader. University of California
Press, 2002. Scholarly essays on aspects of gender that were written with a
wide readership in mind. Accessible for
students.
Susan Glosser’s Li Fengjin: How the New Marriage Law Helped
Chinese Women Stand Up (Opal Magus Books).
Review on Frog in the Well blog: http://www.froginawell.net/china/2005/10/women-hold-up-half-of-heaven/
A HANDOUT I PUT TOGETHER FOR
A WORKSHOP AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY SOME YEARS AGO (Chinese Civilization refers to the book you have that Ebrey edited)
Theme #1: Ideals of masculine and feminine in late imperial China
Literature: Cao
Xueqin (Tsao Hsueh-ch’in), Dream of the
Red Chamber
Suggested
chapters: one through nine.
Selection from Water Margin
A good excerpt of this
Ming novel may be found in Patricia Ebrey, ed. Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook (Free Press, 1993).
Documents: “Family Instructions,” “Concubines,” and
“Genealogy Rules” in Chinese Civilization.
Images: Photographs of men and women in the
Qing era. There is no good collection of
these, to my knowledge, but many are scattered among books on the Qing period
(particularly missionaries’ reports).
Scholarship: Louise Edwards, Men and Women in Qing China: Gender in the Red Chamber Dream
(Brill, 1994).
Theme #2: The family in 20th century East Asia
Literature: Pa Chin (Ba Jin), Family (Waveland, 1972); Richard Kim, Lost Names: Scenes
from a Korean Boyhood (California, 1998); Pak Won-sol, “How I Kept Our
House while My Husband Was Away,” in Hospital
Room 205 (UNESCO, 1983).
Documents: “Funeral Processions” and “My Children” in Chinese Civilization.
Images: “Small Happiness”: a documentary on
women in China filmed in the early 1980s.
Available to borrow at the
University of Illinois’s Asian Educational Media Service [web site: http://www.aems.uiuc.edu/index.las]. Also in
UK’s library. “Festival”: a recent
Korean feature film about a family staging a funeral. Available from the IU East Asian Studies
Center video library.
Scholarship: Lloyd Eastman, “The Family and Individual in
Chinese Society,” chapter two of
Family, Field, and Ancestors (Oxford, 1988).
Theme #3: Social and economic change in 20th century China
Literature: Mao Tun [Mao Dun], “Spring Silkworms,” in
Spring Silkworms and Other Stories
(Foreign Languages Press, 1956).
Documents: Mao
Tse-tung, “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” in
Selected
Works of Mao Tse-tung, v. 1,
(Foreign Languages Press, 1964), 23-59.
Images: “China
in Revolution 1911-1949”: A two-hour documentary that includes a lot of
film footage from 20th century China. It is possible to use excerpts from the
videos to give students an idea of the difficulties of Chinese life in the
1930s.
Scholarship: Lloyd Eastman, “The Agricultural Sector in
the Early Twentieth Century: The
Problem of ‘Peasant
Immiseration,’” chapter five of Family,
Field, and Ancestors (Oxford, 1988).
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