Excerpt from article published in The China Beat, written by Nicole Elizabeth Barnes:
Gail Hershatter’s new book, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, is the outcome of a decade spent conducting oral history interviews of 72 women—and a few surviving men—in rural Shaanxi province. The interviews focus on farming women’s experiences of political campaigns in the 1950s, ranging from land reform to the 1950 Marriage Law to agricultural collectives. The book adds individual women’s voices—often quoted at length—to the narrative of 1950s rural reform, illustrating the taffy pull between empowerment and continued discrimination that women experienced throughout the decade. The Gender of Memory is incredibly thorough, emotionally powerful, beautifully written, theoretically innovative, and personally searching; it will have an earth-shattering effect on the study of Chinese history, calling scholars to new fields of inquiry for decades to come. In order to find out more about the making of this landmark book, I talked with Gail Hershatter and conducted the following interview.
Read the full interview on The China Beat website.
