Women in China: The Republican Period in Historical Perspective (review)

Challenging the conceptual categories conventionally employed by scholars to understand Republican-Era China becomes increasingly important as "modern Chinese history … drifts away from that one [i.e., that history] figuring the centrality of the nation-state toward one where 'structural tension, spatial fragmentation, temporal duality, and unintended consequences, along with unsuspected links of continuity' becomes more common" (p. 474).¹ Women in China accomplishes this task through its exploration of diverse Chinese women's experiences during this tumultuous period of the early twentieth century. Divided into six substantive sections preceded by a detailed introduction, this edited volume contains eighteen in-depth glimpses into the theoretical and empirical issues involved in gendering modern China, especially during the Republican period. By laying out, in exquisite starkness, the multifarious obstacles facing scholars who not only question the "modernist hypothesis" when applied to China but also struggle to put women on the Chinese historiographer's agenda, this book offers key insights into the parallel circumstances of female sinologists and women in China that will be valued in the fields of China studies, comparative gender research, and feminist studies.

Following an introductory overview chapter, the first section, "Questions of Theory and Methodology," contains three chapters that challenge conventional periodizations of China's Republican period, American and European feminist perspectives on Chinese women, and the fit of women's studies research within the field of modern China studies more broadly. Perhaps the most critical appraisal of American and European feminist views and conclusions about women in China, the chapter by Hsiung Ping-chen convincingly reminds us that modernity, in the guise of twentieth-century liberal capitalist conceptual categories, is not the only context in which women become active, vibrant contributors to their own empowerment. In China's Republican period, women and men-for a true gender analysis would focus on both-have much in common with Chinese women and men in premodern times through their struggles to overcome socio-cultural injustice.

The remaining two chapters in the first section serve as bridges between the modern-era past and the reform-era present. Yeh Wen-hsin in her chapter establishes very valid political reasons for the continued insistence by Chinese reformers and intellectuals on Chinese women gaining autonomy in both the 1920s through the 1930s and the 1950s through the 1970s. Whether fighting communism (i.e., the KMT) or capitalism (i.e., the CCP), ruling regimes were caught in a political catch-22 in which they strongly professed women's liberation while also limiting it. Mechthild Leutner's contribution finishes out the section by documenting the "bringing women back in" to modern Chinese history by elaborating on the barriers to further incorporation of a gender perspective in this academic field, and by suggesting methods to improve on the existing state of the discipline. Leutner's most provocative strategy involves the tactical commingling of scholars and practitioners to accomplish their mutual empowerment.

The next section, "Women and the State / Women and the Nation," contains four chapters that show the empirical validity of the theoretical insights offered by Hsiung, Yeh, and Leutner. According to Gotelind Müller, the fitting of feminism into the early twentieth century anarchist movement was no better than the fit of women's studies within Chinese history. Among the significant number of sources consulted by Müller, only He Zhen stands out as the sole female author. So, while Chinese anarchism remained loyal to a "genealogy of ideas" that supported women's liberation, the practices of the movement's primarily male feminists remained more focused on the overturning of the customary family structure. This conclusion is reminiscent of Hsiung's suggestion that gender analysis in modern Chinese history ought to emphasize struggles against human inequity in general, rather than inequity only against women.

Chapters by Louise Edwards, Nicola Spakowski, and Helen Praeger Young in the same section explore the ambiguities facing women under conditions of militarization and war...