Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories / Edition 1

by Zheng Wang

Overview

Centering on five life stories by Chinese women activists born just after the turn of this century, this first history of Chinese May Fourth feminism disrupts the Chinese Communist Party's master narrative of Chinese women's liberation, reconfigures the history of the Chinese Enlightenment from a gender perspective, and addresses the question of how feminism engendered social change cross-culturally.

In this multilayered book, the first-person narratives are complemented by a history of the discursive process and the author's sophisticated intertextual readings. Together, the parts form a fascinating historical portrait of how educated Chinese men and women actively deployed and appropriated ideologies from the West in their pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation. As Wang demonstrates, feminism was embraced by men as instrumental to China's modernity and by women as pointing to a new way of life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520218741
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	07/05/1999
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	417
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Wang Zheng is an Affiliated Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University. Wang's work in English includes the coediting of From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society by Fei Xiaotong (California, 1992).

Table of Contents

List of Photographs
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction
PART ONE. THE SETTING
1. Creating a Feminist Discourse
2 A Case of Circulating Feminism: The Ladies' Journal
PART TWO. PORTRAITS
3· Forgotten Heroines: An Introduction to the Narrators
4· Lu Lihua (1900-1997): School Principal
5· Zhu Su'e (1901-): Attorney
6. Wang Yiwei (1905-1993): Editor in Chief
7· Chen Yongsheng (1900-1997): Educator
8. Huang Dinghui (1907-): Career Revolutionary
Epilogue
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Dorothy Ko

Rarely does a reviewer or publisher encounter a milestone: this is it. It is the first major study of the development of Chinese feminism in what is arguably the most formative period in the history of modern China.
—Dorothy Ko, author of Teachers of the Inner Chambers