Dramatic and far-reaching changes have occurred in the lives of Chinese women in the years since the death of Mao and the fall of the Gang of Four During the decade of the Cultural Revolution, attention to personal life was regarded as 'bourgeois'; in the post-Mao decade, abrupt turns in public policy made discussion of personal life imperative, and nowhere has this been more evident than in the debate about the role of women in Chinese society. This book is based on extensive personal viewing of urban women and study of contemporary literature and articles in the periodical press that...

What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized grouprural womenat 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 parentingeven their notions of virtue and respectability. The...