Editor's Note

Editor's Note The writing of Chinese women's history, both for Western and Chinese scholars, was initially bound to the Communist revolution of 1949. The revolution itself became the focus of early studies, which sought to document women's role in the movement as well as how the revolution liberated (or failed to liberate) women. Many of these studies shared the vision of Chinese women's unmitigated historical oppression articulated by Communist leaders who championed a repudiation of those traditions. Now, it is those very traditions that are the object of critical scrutiny by historians, whose work has been increasingly influenced by cross-cultural studies of gender, sexuality, and feminism. The articles in this special issue represent the growing body of scholarship that disrupts long-held "truths" about Chinese women's history: that Chinese women were pitiful victims of footbinding, seclusion, and Confucian moral dictates. In "The Body as Attire," Dorothy Ko challenges the view of footbinding as the symbol of women's oppression and the movements to abolish it as part of a struggle for women's liberation. Instead, she disrupts the assumption of those movements (and of later historical studies) that footbinding had a uniform, static meaning, and requires us to confront the "nationalist" lens through which most documents about footbinding were produced. By taking us back to pre-nineteenth-century representations of footbinding, Ko shows how footbinding was crucial to the construction of ethnic and gender boundaries, and how in certain historical contexts was a symbol not of backwardness but of civility and cultural advancement. Ann Waltner and Pi-ching Hsu's essay about two women poets of the late sixteenth century adds to the project of showing that Confucian norms requiring gender segregation and seclusion for elite women did not necessarily define those women's social worlds. Indeed, their poetry reveals a world of intimate friendships among women and also provided the means through which elite women articulated a connection to an imagined tradition of heroic, accomplished women. Their poetry was unwittingly part of the creation of Chinese women's history, as they rescued female historical figures from the versions of their lives previously constructed by male writers. Ruth Rogaski, drawing on rich archival research, is able to challenge the public rhetoric of the late nineteenth-century founders of orphanages and widow homes. If one took their pronouncements at face value, as have many previous scholars, these welfare institutions would appear as 1997 EDITOR'S Note 7 bastions of Confucian piety and havens for female chastity. Rogaski shows how one such home, in the Northern city of Tianjin, was not the Confucian refuge for chaste widows that its directors depicted, but was actually a shelter for young women who had been abused in the emerging national market for women. In "Female Heroes and Moonish Lovers," music historian and ethnomusicologist Su Zheng turns to musical texts for an analysis of changing representations of women in the early twentieth century. By focusing on modern Chinese songs, she is able to show that the transformations in gender ideology were far more complex and ambiguous than has been previously recognized by scholars who have relied on literary texts and political discourse. This essay represents the first feminist reading of Chinese music history. The concluding essay of this issue, "Maoism, Feminism, and the UN Conference on Women," presents an analysis of the development of women's studies research in China, showing that the historical context in which women's studies research emerged in China is altogether different from that in which it unfolded in the United States. Women's studies therefore has radically different meanings and political implications in each country. Historian Wang Zheng provides a critical discussion of Chinese feminism and examines how the relationship of feminism to women's studies research was affected by the UN Conference on Women in 1995. Her essay provides an important challenge to the oft-held assumption that Western feminism and Chinese feminism are discrete, separable ideologies. Refusing to accept the argument that Chinese feminism is simply an adoption of Western beliefs, she proposes a far more complex understanding of the categories "Western," "Chinese," "women's studies," and "feminism." Although the subjects of...