Gail Hershatter and her Shaanxi-native research collaborator Gao Xiaoxian (of the Shaanxi Provincial Women’s Federation) spent ten years interviewing 72 women and a few men in rural Shaanxi province in northwest China. The Gender of Memory, Hershatter’s sole-authored product of this joint effort, fills a crucial gap in historiography of the 1950s, providing the first personal stories of land reform, the 1950 Marriage Law, collectivization, and the Great Leap Forward. Moreover, through incisive gender analysis, Hershatter illustrates how gender determined not only how Chinese women and men lived their lives, but also how they remember them. Whereas male interviewees used political events as the primary signposts of their lives, women tabulated their life narratives with personal events such as marriage, childbirth, and family deaths, sometimes re-ordering or re-naming political campaigns

Barnes, Nicole Elizabeth

English

DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska

University of Nebraska - LincolnDigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - LincolnThe China Beat Blog Archive 2008-2012 China Beat Archive2012Book Review: The Gender of MemoryNicole Elizabeth BarnesUniversity of California, Irvine, nicole.barnes@duke.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/chinabeatarchivePart of the Asian History Commons, Asian Studies Commons, Chinese Studies Commons, andthe International Relations CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the China Beat Archive at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has beenaccepted for inclusion in The China Beat Blog Archive 2008-2012 by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska -Lincoln.Barnes, Nicole Elizabeth, "Book Review: The Gender of Memory" (2012). The China Beat Blog Archive 2008-2012. 21.https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/chinabeatarchive/21Book Review: The Gender of Memory February 14, 2012 in Books by Twentieth-Century China Hershatter, Gail. The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011, xii, 455 pp. $49.95 (cloth). By Nicole Elizabeth Barnes Gail Hershatter and her Shaanxi-native research collaborator Gao Xiaoxian (of the Shaanxi Provincial Women’s Federation) spent ten years interviewing 72 women and a few men in rural Shaanxi province in northwest China. The Gender of Memory, Hershatter’s sole-authored product of this joint effort, fills a crucial gap in historiography of the 1950s, providing the first personal stories of land reform, the 1950 Marriage Law, collectivization, and the Great Leap Forward. Moreover, through incisive gender analysis, Hershatter illustrates how gender determined not only how Chinese women and men lived their lives, but also how they remember them. Whereas male interviewees used political events as the primary signposts of their lives, women tabulated their life narratives with personal events such as marriage, childbirth, and family deaths, sometimes re-ordering or re-naming political campaigns. Women’s narratives of the past alternately troubled and reinforced state discourse. Interviews uncovered a tension between the reality, in pre-Liberation days, of poor farming women left unprotected as they worked and traveled outside the home, and their characterization of this era as one of “feudal” seclusion within the home, in a manner coinciding with Communist propaganda of women’s liberation. Faced with this tension between the women’s self-characterization with a post-’49 vocabulary and their actual pre-’49 experiences, Hershatter and Gao concluded that women may have preferred imagining themselves as having been constrained under “feudalism” rather than left alone to fend for themselves and their children without the help of menfolk, too poor to afford the luxury of seclusion at home (p. 37). Yet other interviewees emphasized the absence of men, in both the pre-Communist and Communist eras, and hence the extreme hardships they faced as single mothers solely responsible for both farm work and housework. Regardless of whether their memories confirmed or contradicted the Communist narrative of women’s liberation, the interviews showed that rural women generally ordered their lives around family and local relationships, with political campaigns in the interstices. Here Hershatter contributes to the long-lived state-and-society debate in Chinese historiography. Drawing on Timothy Mitchell’s theory of the “state effect” to trouble the Communist state’s self-narrative of reforming a society from which it stood separate and apart, Hershatter explores how rural women were incorporated into the state as both agents and targets of state reforms. For many rural women, relations with female labor models or dundian cadres (non-local officials residing with local families) constituted their interactions with “the state.” For the labor models and cadres themselves, taking on a state-defined role as an agent of reform both set them apart from local society and enmeshed them much more deeply in local relationships and national politics. As local embodiments of the state, these women transformed state projects into local projects, bringing national politics into village life and domestic spaces (p. 68, 210). Allowing her interviewees to speak for themselves in frequent and often long quotations, Hershatter illustrates that women were incorporated into the state in moments, spaces, and modes that differed from those of men. Women earned fewer work points than did men for the same labor; agricultural collectivization effaced and discounted women’s reproductive, domestic, and handicraft labors; reforms in midwifery left farming women thoroughly exhausted with more children surviving gestation and infancy; political reforms hewed generational cleavages between mothers and daughters as younger women were more likely than their elders to fight gender discrimination in work point allotments or to resist arranged marriages; female labor models who attended mixed-sex meetings came under intense scrutiny even while exercising extreme caution to protect their chastity. As narrated by the women themselves, political campaigns touched women’s lives in very personal ways that tell of continued gender discrimination within the very legislation that has nearly eradicated the greatest threats to women’s wellbeing: chronic poverty, banditry, illiteracy, and disease. Hershatter’s analysis of these narratives, with gender at the center, uncovers an entirely new picture of 1950s China. Moving beyond her first question, “Did women have a Chinese revolution?” (p. 7), she troubles the narrative of progress and reveals the gender-contingent contours of China’s socialist reforms. Her gender analysis of land reform and collectivization illustrates that rural women’s agricultural and domestic labors enabled the success of the Communist revolution, the very revolution that in many ways left this generation of rural women behind. Hershatter shows convincingly that we cannot understand twentieth-century China without appreciating the particular contributions and social position of these women (pp. 264-65, 287). This book is powerful in yet another way: it is startlingly frank about the historian’s positionality in the production of (oral) history. Hershatter challenges the myth of uncovering a raw and unmediated history via interviews with “the subaltern who speaks” (p. 204), and occasionally shares interview segments with the reader that strained her and Gao Xiaoxian’s interpretive powers. She thereby identifies herself as simultaneous consumer and co-creator of the documents (in this case, oral history interviews) from which she crafts her own historical narrative. Such honesty carries the historian’s craft far beyond the linguistic turn and brings Hershatter into dialogue with theorists and scholars who are shaping the future of the field. Because so many men died in China’s twentieth-century wars (between warlords in the 1920s and 30s, with Japan from 1937 to 1945, and between the Communists and Nationalists from 1947 to 1949), Hershatter and Gao were only able to interview a small number of elderly men. Therefore the book’s comparison between male and female narrations of the past relies on a sex-skewed interview sample that may beg revision if future scholarship applies it to a different source base. Nonetheless, Hershatter’s gender analysis of memory, her introduction of personal narratives of rural life in the early Communist era, her theorization of the gendered inflection of state-society relations, and her refreshingly candid model of oral history make The Gender of Memory a path-breaking work in Chinese studies. Nicole Elizabeth Barnes is PhD candidate in modern Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine. © 2012 by Twentieth-Century China Editorial Board. All rights reserved.    

Book Review: \u3ci\u3eThe Gender of Memory\u3c/i\u3e

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University of Nebraska - Lincoln
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
The China Beat Blog Archive 2008-2012 China Beat Archive
2012
Book Review: The Gender of Memory
Nicole Elizabeth Barnes
University of California, Irvine, nicole.barnes@duke.edu
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/chinabeatarchive
Part of the Asian History Commons, Asian Studies Commons, Chinese Studies Commons, and
the International Relations Commons
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the China Beat Archive at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been
accepted for inclusion in The China Beat Blog Archive 2008-2012 by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska -
Lincoln.
Barnes, Nicole Elizabeth, "Book Review: The Gender of Memory" (2012). The China Beat Blog Archive 2008-2012. 21.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/chinabeatarchive/21
Book Review: The Gender of Memory 
February 14, 2012 in Books by Twentieth-Century China 
Hershatter, Gail. The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and 
China’s Collective Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011, xii, 455 pp. $49.95 
(cloth). 
By Nicole Elizabeth Barnes 
Gail Hershatter and her Shaanxi-native research collaborator Gao Xiaoxian (of the Shaanxi 
Provincial Women’s Federation) spent ten years interviewing 72 women and a few men in rural 
Shaanxi province in northwest China. The Gender of Memory, Hershatter’s sole-authored 
product of this joint effort, fills a crucial gap in historiography of the 1950s, providing the first 
personal stories of land reform, the 1950 Marriage Law, collectivization, and the Great Leap 
Forward. Moreover, through incisive gender analysis, Hershatter illustrates how gender 
determined not only how Chinese women and men lived their lives, but also how they remember 
them. Whereas male interviewees used political events as the primary signposts of their lives, 
women tabulated their life narratives with personal events such as marriage, childbirth, and 
family deaths, sometimes re-ordering or re-naming political campaigns. 
Women’s narratives of the past alternately troubled and reinforced state discourse. Interviews 
uncovered a tension between the reality, in pre-Liberation days, of poor farming women left 
unprotected as they worked and traveled outside the home, and their characterization of this era 
as one of “feudal” seclusion within the home, in a manner coinciding with Communist 
propaganda of women’s liberation. Faced with this tension between the women’s self-
characterization with a post-’49 vocabulary and their actual pre-’49 experiences, Hershatter and 
Gao concluded that women may have preferred imagining themselves as having been 
constrained under “feudalism” rather than left alone to fend for themselves and their children 
without the help of menfolk, too poor to afford the luxury of seclusion at home (p. 37). Yet other 
interviewees emphasized the absence of men, in both the pre-Communist and Communist eras, 
and hence the extreme hardships they faced as single mothers solely responsible for both farm 
work and housework. Regardless of whether their memories confirmed or contradicted the 
Communist narrative of women’s liberation, the interviews showed that rural women generally 
ordered their lives around family and local relationships, with political campaigns in the 
interstices. 
Here Hershatter contributes to the long-lived state-and-society debate in Chinese historiography. 
Drawing on Timothy Mitchell’s theory of the “state effect” to trouble the Communist state’s self-
narrative of reforming a society from which it stood separate and apart, Hershatter explores how 
rural women were incorporated into the state as both agents and targets of state reforms. For 
many rural women, relations with female labor models or dundian cadres (non-local officials 
residing with local families) constituted their interactions with “the state.” For the labor models 
and cadres themselves, taking on a state-defined role as an agent of reform both set them apart 
from local society and enmeshed them much more deeply in local relationships and national 
politics. As local embodiments of the state, these women transformed state projects into local 
projects, bringing national politics into village life and domestic spaces (p. 68, 210). 
Allowing her interviewees to speak for themselves in frequent and often long quotations, 
Hershatter illustrates that women were incorporated into the state in moments, spaces, and modes 
that differed from those of men. Women earned fewer work points than did men for the same 
labor; agricultural collectivization effaced and discounted women’s reproductive, domestic, and 
handicraft labors; reforms in midwifery left farming women thoroughly exhausted with more 
children surviving gestation and infancy; political reforms hewed generational cleavages 
between mothers and daughters as younger women were more likely than their elders to fight 
gender discrimination in work point allotments or to resist arranged marriages; female labor 
models who attended mixed-sex meetings came under intense scrutiny even while exercising 
extreme caution to protect their chastity. As narrated by the women themselves, political 
campaigns touched women’s lives in very personal ways that tell of continued gender 
discrimination within the very legislation that has nearly eradicated the greatest threats to 
women’s wellbeing: chronic poverty, banditry, illiteracy, and disease. 
Hershatter’s analysis of these narratives, with gender at the center, uncovers an entirely new 
picture of 1950s China. Moving beyond her first question, “Did women have a Chinese 
revolution?” (p. 7), she troubles the narrative of progress and reveals the gender-contingent 
contours of China’s socialist reforms. Her gender analysis of land reform and collectivization 
illustrates that rural women’s agricultural and domestic labors enabled the success of the 
Communist revolution, the very revolution that in many ways left this generation of rural women 
behind. Hershatter shows convincingly that we cannot understand twentieth-century China 
without appreciating the particular contributions and social position of these women (pp. 264-65, 
287). 
This book is powerful in yet another way: it is startlingly frank about the historian’s positionality 
in the production of (oral) history. Hershatter challenges the myth of uncovering a raw and 
unmediated history via interviews with “the subaltern who speaks” (p. 204), and occasionally 
shares interview segments with the reader that strained her and Gao Xiaoxian’s interpretive 
powers. She thereby identifies herself as simultaneous consumer and co-creator of the documents 
(in this case, oral history interviews) from which she crafts her own historical narrative. Such 
honesty carries the historian’s craft far beyond the linguistic turn and brings Hershatter into 
dialogue with theorists and scholars who are shaping the future of the field. 
Because so many men died in China’s twentieth-century wars (between warlords in the 1920s 
and 30s, with Japan from 1937 to 1945, and between the Communists and Nationalists from 
1947 to 1949), Hershatter and Gao were only able to interview a small number of elderly men. 
Therefore the book’s comparison between male and female narrations of the past relies on a sex-
skewed interview sample that may beg revision if future scholarship applies it to a different 
source base. Nonetheless, Hershatter’s gender analysis of memory, her introduction of personal 
narratives of rural life in the early Communist era, her theorization of the gendered inflection of 
state-society relations, and her refreshingly candid model of oral history make The Gender of 
Memory a path-breaking work in Chinese studies. 
Nicole Elizabeth Barnes is PhD candidate in modern Chinese history at the 
University of California, Irvine. 
© 2012 by Twentieth-Century China Editorial Board. All rights reserved. 
 
 
 


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Book Review: \u3ci\u3eThe Gender of Memory\u3c/i\u3e

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