Gender in Motion Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China

by Goodman, Bryna; Larson, Wendy

• ISBN13: 9780742538245
• ISBN10: 0742538249
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-05-12
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Summary

Bringing together the work of distinguished China historians, anthropologists, and literary and film scholars, Gender in Motion raises provocative questions about the diversity of gender practices during the late imperial society and the persistence and transformation of older gender ideologies under the conditions of modernity in China. While several studies have investigated gender or labor in late imperial and twentieth century China, this book brings these two concepts together, asking how these two categories interacted and produced new social practices and theories. Individual chapters examine agricultural and urban work, travel within China, overseas study, polyandry, the acting profession, courtesan culture, female politicians, Maoist work culture, and the boundaries of virtue and respectability.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Axes of Gender: Divisions of Labor and Spatial Separation	1	(28)
Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson
Part I: Patterns of Mobility
1 Making Sex Work: Polyandry as a Survival Strategy in Qing Dynasty China	29	(26)
Matthew H. Sommer
2 The Virtue of Travel for Women in the Late Empire	55	(20)
Susan Mann
3 Gender on Stage: Actresses in an Actors' World (1895-1930)	75	(22)
Luo Suwen
4 Women on the Move: Women's Kinship, Residence, and Networks in Rural Shandong	97	(24)
Ellen R. Judd
Part II: Spatial Transformations
5 Between Nei and Wai: Chinese Women Students in Japan in the Early Twentieth Century	121	(24)
Joan Judge
6 Playing with the Public: Late Qing Courtesans and Their Opera Singer Lovers	145	(24)
Catherine Vance Yeh
7 Unofficial History and Gender Boundary Crossing in the Early Chinese Republic: Shen Peizhen and Xiaofengxian	169	(20)
Madeleine Yue Dong
8 Gender and Maoist Urban Reorganization	189	(22)
Wang Zheng
9 He Yi's The Postman: The Work Space of a New Age Maoist	211
Wendy Larson
Part III: Boundaries
10 Women's Work and the Economics of Respectability	239	(26)
Kenneth Pomeranz
11 The Vocational Woman and the Elusiveness of "Personhood" in Early Republican China	265	(22)
Bryna Goodman
12 Women's Work and Boundary Transgression in Wang Dulu's Popular Novels	287	(22)
Tze-lan Deborah Sang
13 Virtue at Work: Rural Shaanxi Women Remember the 1950's	309	(20)
Gail Hershatter
Index	329	(12)
About the Contributors	341