Chinese women’s history reflecting decades of social expansion
Gail Hershatter
Gail Hershatter, a leading Western scholar in the field of Chinese women’s history, has witnessed the field of Chinese women’s historical studies move from the edge of academia to the mainstream in the United States. In May, Hershatter shared her experience and her understanding of research with CSST reporter over the course of an extensive interview.
CSST: How did you become intertwined with China, and when did you begin to study Chinese history?
Hershatter: My story with China is closely tied to the development of Sino-US relations. At high school, I became interested in China. With my entire generation, the outbreak of the Vietnam War made us know something about Asia and China. When I was at college, “Ping Pong Diplomacy” was carried out and President Nixon visited China. It seemed that news reports and pictures on this crammed the front page of every newspaper. Moreover, different from the past, these reports and pictures were portrayed in a positive way. At that time, I began to enroll in a study group to learn Chinese history and language. In 1975, I went to China for the first time and I visited Beijing and several cities in the northeast over the course of three weeks. Despite being such a short journey, this gave me a deep impression and I truly wanted to continue to stay in China. When I came back to the U.S., I started to work for my Ph.D. degree at Stanford University. In 1979, when Sino-US relations became normalized, I went to Nankai University to conduct academic research in Tianjin.
During two years in Tianjin, I learned a lot. When Deng Xiaoping proposed the idea of “emancipating the mind and seeking truth from facts,” I could deeply feel the active social circumstances in Tianjin. Before I went to Tianjin, I didn’t know enough about Chinese history and political issues. But based on communications with local Chinese over these two years in Tianjin, I discovered that many issues had their own complexities and they could not be treated as the same. I met a lot of “laosanjie” (middle and high school graduates in 1966-1968) college students, and they showed interest in American history and world history. When I was teaching, Chinese students would ask me what Americans think about President Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt. But in the U.S., students showed less interest in China, probably because there were fewer opportunities for them, Americans paid less attention to other countries’ history. So I made a decision that when I returned to the U.S. I would teach American students Chinese history and culture to help them know more about China.
My major at college was Chinese history but I’m also fond of Chinese labor history and women’s history. I looked up old newspapers and materials at libraries in Tianjin. I rode a bike to visit many old workers’ families and then completed my first monograph, The Workers of Tianjin: 1900-1949. In this book, there is a specific section about women workers in Tianjin. Around the same time, a second wave of the feminist movement in the U.S. had emerged, and a new disciplinary study, women’s history, just stood out at college.
CSST: Women’s history is an interdisciplinary study, and what’s your take on cross-disciplinary approach?
Hershatter: The interdisciplinary feature of the study has opened me great opportunities to learn from various fields. For instance, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past has gathered knowledge from different disciplines and people who accepted my interviews are not lifeless displays in a museum, but figures who are alive. I need to apply knowledge and research methods from history, anthropology and psychology into my research. And I’m really happy that I can utilize different disciplinary analytical tools without limiting myself only to my major.
CSST: Why do you think modern Chinese women’s studies are important to modern Chinese history studies?
Hershatter: I think that when teaching students modern Chinese history, we cannot avoid modern Chinese women’s history. Twentieth-century Chinese women’s issues were closely related to the political, social and cultural changes at that time. Taking the Hundred Days’ Reform and the May Fourth Movement as examples, we can see whether or not the status of women can be improved has become a significant benchmark for measuring the progressiveness of reforms in modern Chinese history.
In the late 19th century, when Chinese intellectuals strove for China’s future, they took women education as one of the windows. Liang Qichao once actively promoted women’s education and regarded running schools for women as a benchmark for realizing national rejuvenation. He mentioned that women’s independence contributes to improving the national status. In fact, some female intellectuals brought advanced ideas and knowledge to China after studying in Japan.
CSST: Your work Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century has been evaluated as “a guide to know Chinese women in the 20th century.” How do you comment?
Hershatter: The editor of the Journal of Asian Studies once asked me whether I’d like to write an article to systemize English works on twentieth-century Chinese women in order to allow more scholars to form a clear and intuitional picture in this area. When I started to prepare materials for the article, I collected more than 500 books and articles. Besides, Chinese women’s studies in the West had been established for 30 years and these achievements could not be covered in a single article. Since the mid-1980s, Chinese women’s studies have grown very rapidly, and this new area has absorbed many research methods from other disciplines such as history, anthropology, sociology and literature.
In the U.S. and Europe, research on ancient Chinese history and modern Chinese history is abundant, but these researchers know little about Chinese women. In the past decades, gender issues have attracted talented scholars and they have realized fruitful achievements. That’s the reason why I wrote this book in an attempt to present a comprehensive picture of Chinese women’s studies to readers, including not only the academic advances accumulated in this area, but also the fragments or the parts few scholars have ever thought about.
CSST: Comparatively, how do you see Chinese women’s studies both in China and in the U.S.?
Hershatter: In the early 1990s, I attended a seminar on Chinese women’s studies at Harvard University and I was deeply impressed by many Chinese attendees. Although we come from different cultural backgrounds, we are in the same field and it’s very interesting that we can discuss our work and share ideas. Since then, more and more Chinese and American scholars in the field of women’s studies have exchanged ideas and the Chinese government consistently pays attention to women’s issues and women’s studies. In 1995, the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing. In the early 1990s, a bunch of women’s study centers were established at Chinese colleges and research institutes, maintaining close touch with worldwide women’s research centers and scholars. The subjects such as Chinese classical female literature work and female migrant workers in contemporary China have once become the research highlights in the field of sociology, literature and other disciplines. I also hope that one day women’s history studies could generate more attentions and responses in China.
Not until 1970s, influenced by American human rights campaigns and the feminist movement, researchers in Chinese studies in North America gradually started to explore materials on women in Chinese history. So it was not easy to find documents and literature on this subject at my early research period. Although “pioneers” in this field with different disciplinary backgrounds and in different ages, we all witnessed each period of Chinese women’s history studies in the U.S. from its burst to becoming strong. Entering into 1990s, Chinese women’s history studies in the U.S. has become independent and mature and it gets more diversified since the mid-1990s.
Zhang Xiaoxi is a reporter from Chinese Social Sciences Today.
The Chinese version appeared in Chinese Social Sciences Today, No. 600, May 26, 2014
Translated by Zhang Mengying
The Chinese link:
http://www.csstoday.net/xueshuzixun/guoneixinwen/89723.html