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Asia Pacific Modern
Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past
What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group―rural women―at the center of the inquiry? In this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these women’s life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it affected women’s agricultural work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting―even their notions of virtue and respectability. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues, important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power, difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present, Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.
480 pages, Hardcover
First published July 30, 2011
19 people are currently reading
324 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
February 15, 2017
While reading Hershatter’s oral history, I keep thinking about what I have done for my family.
I once wrote the oral history of my mum. This is the only enjoyable homework I have done for this kind of course called Marxist theory with Chinese Characteristics in my graduate school. We have learnt this course since junior high school. After writing the oral history, I shared this piece with all the relatives of my mother’s side. They all encouraged me to do another one for my grandfather and grandmother. I did interview them during one Chinese New Year. I was frustrated that I could not even connect their experiences together, partly due to their ways of speaking and largely because of my unfamiliarity of their early lives. Reading Hershatter’s book really helps me understand their lives better.
I once wrote the oral history of my mum. This is the only enjoyable homework I have done for this kind of course called Marxist theory with Chinese Characteristics in my graduate school. We have learnt this course since junior high school. After writing the oral history, I shared this piece with all the relatives of my mother’s side. They all encouraged me to do another one for my grandfather and grandmother. I did interview them during one Chinese New Year. I was frustrated that I could not even connect their experiences together, partly due to their ways of speaking and largely because of my unfamiliarity of their early lives. Reading Hershatter’s book really helps me understand their lives better.
September 1, 2025
这本书通过对妇女的访谈，讲述新中国建立之后“农业的女性化”。女性管理者们发挥着自己的积极性，探索新的合作形式。然而，女性劳模逐渐被变成一个“符号”，成为国家政策可行性的代言人。与此同时，妇女不仅承受着身体劳动的压力，同时还要承担家务、生育和道德压力。对于妇女生育和孩子死亡的描写实在太过残忍，然而一句都没删；中后部分删掉的全是关于“三年困难时期”的内容。怎么说，“大跃进”之后发生了什么还想假装没发生过吗？
平凡的女性们通过“诉苦”和对过往历史的重述（包括遗忘、记错），书写了历史中未曾被记录的一面。很喜欢这本书对方法论的讨论，以及带有感情的对整段历史的讨论。整体可以五星吧。
平凡的女性们通过“诉苦”和对过往历史的重述（包括遗忘、记错），书写了历史中未曾被记录的一面。很喜欢这本书对方法论的讨论，以及带有感情的对整段历史的讨论。整体可以五星吧。
May 8, 2025
Perf for my exam
November 14, 2011
An awesome anthropological study by a historian. A wonderful piece of interdisciplinary work. A must read for those interested in Chinese revolution.
The writing is so eloquent and she skillfully juxtaposes long narratives of rural women's with her analysis. it's pretty much like Sima Qian's style: story and then the historian says. But it's done is a much more sophisticated way so that you can both empathize with these women and keep a critical distance with them at the same time.
A masterpiece!
The writing is so eloquent and she skillfully juxtaposes long narratives of rural women's with her analysis. it's pretty much like Sima Qian's style: story and then the historian says. But it's done is a much more sophisticated way so that you can both empathize with these women and keep a critical distance with them at the same time.
A masterpiece!
August 17, 2023
这是一本非常不错的社会学书籍，让我明白为什么当初共产党要用农村来包围城市，因为农民的淳朴好利用，他们“解放”妇女，实际上她们只是劳力上的替代品。那种给妇女的“解放”意识其实是一种无承诺的幻念，如今还有谁记得她们当年的付出，农村到底是被遗忘的过去。
June 21, 2021
A decade of interviews of rural women counting down their last years in others’ ignorance brought light on the dimmed memories of the Chinese communist revolution in its margins. Triply subordinated in location, class, and gender, rural women in the 1950s and their limited personal traces left historians few options in reconstructing their lives.
Oral history provides a rare map to the lived experience in the impoverished, newly “liberated” countryside not far from the Yan’an Soviet base. But more than using memory to revive and preserve specific information, Gail Hershatter practiced a close reading of and around the memories and their fallacy. What she aimed at, then, was an empathetic understanding of the "narrative structure, elisions, silences, opacity, and lies” derived from the intersected gaps between the structural “campaign time” and the messy “lived time.” The gendered lens enables both temporalities to co-exist within the same space, that is, the very important but often overlooked local place where socialism materially existed, despite (or because of) its partial comprehension and ill practice.
Adhering to, but also contesting, the state-sanctioned narrative of speaking bitterness, the rural Shaanxi women’s recollection opens up fresh grounds for assessing the patchwork of political mobilization under the socialist utopia. Every agenda generated not an intact, synchronous progress, but an uneven and fragmented mixture of social progress and new contradictions that the official theorizing of socialist plan fell short of articulation.
Specific stories sprang from the status of labor model, motherhood, midwifery, and local-based activism, making visible not a singularized narrative, but a spectrum of old and new perceptions, laws, policies, and technologies uncomfortably co-inhabiting the small but changing villages and towns. While we are immersed in the phrase "gender is socially constructed,” getting to know the specificity of social relations constructed by a particular historical circumstance that has been obliterated by the global capitalist time is far more challenging.
The province in which all the interviews were conducted, Shaanxi famously houses the Yan'an Soviet base, the remote hinterland that sheltered the Chinese Communist Party from its elimination by the then dominant anti-leftist Nationalist Party. Once the earliest civilizational center of China, dating back to the first imperial dynasty of Qin, Shaanxi became a “backwater” as treaty ports opened along the coast and aged agricultural transportation passages gave way to emerging industrial networks since the mid-19th century.
Yet, Shaanxi alone posed great challenge to the unification, and later on collectivization, of the Chinese political, economic, and cultural landscapes. The province is geographically and demographically at the intersection of two dividing lines—the natural Qinling-Huaihe line that splits northern and southern China, and, in a prescient view, the Hu Huanyong line (Heihe-Tengchong) that delineates the dramatic divisions of population (94:6), wealth, and urbanization between eastern and western China. It takes great creativity and imagination to mediate what was “above” in Beijing and the provincial capital to connect and communicate with what was down on the ground. Somewhat counterintuitively, the penetration of power depends on its own reinterpretation and dissipation. The relationship between the center and the periphery is always in tension and to be solved. Such is the entry point and means of studying a complex nondemocratic society beyond the entrapment of the simplified, visibility-based gender-equity assessment.
Oral history provides a rare map to the lived experience in the impoverished, newly “liberated” countryside not far from the Yan’an Soviet base. But more than using memory to revive and preserve specific information, Gail Hershatter practiced a close reading of and around the memories and their fallacy. What she aimed at, then, was an empathetic understanding of the "narrative structure, elisions, silences, opacity, and lies” derived from the intersected gaps between the structural “campaign time” and the messy “lived time.” The gendered lens enables both temporalities to co-exist within the same space, that is, the very important but often overlooked local place where socialism materially existed, despite (or because of) its partial comprehension and ill practice.
Adhering to, but also contesting, the state-sanctioned narrative of speaking bitterness, the rural Shaanxi women’s recollection opens up fresh grounds for assessing the patchwork of political mobilization under the socialist utopia. Every agenda generated not an intact, synchronous progress, but an uneven and fragmented mixture of social progress and new contradictions that the official theorizing of socialist plan fell short of articulation.
Specific stories sprang from the status of labor model, motherhood, midwifery, and local-based activism, making visible not a singularized narrative, but a spectrum of old and new perceptions, laws, policies, and technologies uncomfortably co-inhabiting the small but changing villages and towns. While we are immersed in the phrase "gender is socially constructed,” getting to know the specificity of social relations constructed by a particular historical circumstance that has been obliterated by the global capitalist time is far more challenging.
The province in which all the interviews were conducted, Shaanxi famously houses the Yan'an Soviet base, the remote hinterland that sheltered the Chinese Communist Party from its elimination by the then dominant anti-leftist Nationalist Party. Once the earliest civilizational center of China, dating back to the first imperial dynasty of Qin, Shaanxi became a “backwater” as treaty ports opened along the coast and aged agricultural transportation passages gave way to emerging industrial networks since the mid-19th century.
Yet, Shaanxi alone posed great challenge to the unification, and later on collectivization, of the Chinese political, economic, and cultural landscapes. The province is geographically and demographically at the intersection of two dividing lines—the natural Qinling-Huaihe line that splits northern and southern China, and, in a prescient view, the Hu Huanyong line (Heihe-Tengchong) that delineates the dramatic divisions of population (94:6), wealth, and urbanization between eastern and western China. It takes great creativity and imagination to mediate what was “above” in Beijing and the provincial capital to connect and communicate with what was down on the ground. Somewhat counterintuitively, the penetration of power depends on its own reinterpretation and dissipation. The relationship between the center and the periphery is always in tension and to be solved. Such is the entry point and means of studying a complex nondemocratic society beyond the entrapment of the simplified, visibility-based gender-equity assessment.
April 4, 2021
Very very good. Better at talking about the 1950s and 60s in China than almost any book I've read, especially through putting them into context with before 1949 and after Reform and Opening. Strong explanation through women's personal experiences helps to shift to more complicated and interesting exploration of what that era meant to people. I think even an undergrad class could benefit from including a chapter or two in assigned readings.
May 31, 2021
New sources (oral history) and new approaches (state-building after cultural turn). introduction中關於中國婦女的十幾個問題，在隨後的九章內容中都得到了解答。幾個印象深刻的observation：中央的政策必然會被地方的獨特性compromise；婦女解放這一議題常常淹沒在國家更為看重的project（如合作化、肅反、大躍進等等）下；婦女大範圍參加與負擔耕作早在大躍進時期已經開始，是毛時代中國農業的重要組成部分。
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 6, 2021
从一句句口述和记录中，看到中国农村女性生活的微观世界。
当然女性的生存状态不仅是政策和法律问题，在一个传统文化根深蒂固的社会里，几乎所有人包括青年中年老年的男性女性，都同时对女性的生活产生影响。
时至今日，女性在社会中承受的莫名的压力仍然巨大。
删减部分还未看，根据经验只会更加震惊。
当然女性的生存状态不仅是政策和法律问题，在一个传统文化根深蒂固的社会里，几乎所有人包括青年中年老年的男性女性，都同时对女性的生活产生影响。
时至今日，女性在社会中承受的莫名的压力仍然巨大。
删减部分还未看，根据经验只会更加震惊。
January 16, 2022
记错和遗忘也是一种阐释。
如果没有妇女可见及不可见的劳动，改革试验和革命会如此成功吗？
如果没有妇女可见及不可见的劳动，改革试验和革命会如此成功吗？
February 15, 2023
贺萧利用口述史料，重新还原了集体化时期陕西农村妇女的生活和情感。最生动的，莫过于这些妇女对苦难的叙述。她们顽强而又乐观，为集体化做出了巨大的贡献，也付出了惨重的代价，历尽艰难活过那个时代，却在改革时期被人忽视和遗忘，成为昨日黄花。另，简体中文版经过了大量删改，尤以最后两章为甚。这再度说明，当今的中国，对当局过往苛政的任何批评、指责或调侃都不被允许，即使你指出的是事实。
June 7, 2025
想看了那么久终于读完了，真是大段大段删。接生那一章要吓坏我。真是惯会用后即弃的。
September 6, 2025
Old Chinese ladies be like - “bitterness”
October 27, 2025
Uses advanced oral history methods
January 2, 2023
感觉到随处可见的火花。农村妇女在考虑离婚时的选择；农业的女性化，女性解放了男人使其可以参与工程建设和技术作；动员女性参与生产时同工同酬的宣传与现实间的差别，女性的反应；接生员一章太恐怖啦；农村女性家务劳动只有在需要女性最大程度地参与生产时才会被国家意识到，其他时间是一种新的隐性存在；模范不是被发现的，而是被定点培养出来的；女性没有忘记饥荒年代，甚至表达对集体化的不满，但并未将之归咎于国家；她们不为集体的消失而感到遗憾，但也没有批判集体，她们讲述了一个“生活两次变得更好的故事”。在这个故事中，集体化和去集体化彼此不矛盾，两者都是进步。
April 30, 2015
Excellent book. Gail Hershatter interviews dozes of elderly Chinese women in one province about their experiences in the 1950s under communist rule. Hershatter believes that women, esp. rural women, played a much larger role in the PRC's attempted reforms than most historians realize. By collecting these stories, Hershatter critiques official state narratives and expands our understanding of Chinese communism beyond the cities to the countryside. She also preserves these stories for the future. Sure, every province had its own version(s) of socialism, so you can't say that Hershatter's findings apply to every province, but the book still is fascinating. Hershatter's argument about gender is a bit hard to grasp; with some help from my teacher, I identified her thesis - gender is the space between individuals and the government, where identity politics are hashed out. Gender is a socially constructed space that shapes historical memory. Women often remember family events, such as births and deaths, whereas men often think in terms of political or economic events. The communist revolution brought about some good changes and independence for rural women in the early 1950s, before years of famine, corruption, and disaster made rural Chinese life a misery. Ultimately, Hershatter argues that the resilient peasant women who endured the rough twentieth century are now being ignored and sidelined, not just in historiography, but also in real life. Too few of the villagers care for these elderly women.
May 13, 2020
Reading through this again, I am reminded of how absolutely amazing it is. It’s arguments, evidence, stories, and contributions to the field are immense. It’s essential reading for all PRC historians I think. It discusses gender, memory, rural China, sources, and the problems that come with all of them. It strikes me even more on my second reading, especially chapters 1, 2, 8, and 10.
February 6, 2016
Amazing book. Don't understand why it didn't receive the Levenson Prize.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews