Women and China's Revolutions offers a redefinition of the field of modern Chinese history by raising the question: what happens to our view of China's last 200 years when women are placed at the centre of the account? The result, in this compelling volume, is a nuanced and multi-layered revision with several distinct dimensions.

The encompassing direction is conveyed through the “and” of the title – at once linking and distinguishing its two key subjects: women and China's revolutions. The sweep of the volume covers the succession of revolutions that have marked China's modern history, bookending them with a baseline period of latent social fractures in the early 19th century and a later period of relative stability at the turn of the 21st century. In every chapter there is a strong empirically substantiated engagement with the lives and the labour of women. Hershatter includes and contrasts these for all strata – elite, working and outcast – recuperating the writings of elite literate women and focusing as much as meagre sources permit (with the lacunae clearly noted) on those whose lives were little or not at all recorded. The biographical and narrative elements evoke each period effectively, and allow much of the more standard history to be presented from the perspective of women, while digressing adroitly as needed to provide chronologies and links to familiar historical thresholds.

One dimension of the volume is the excavation of women's lived experience, drawing strongly on the words and records of these women themselves, and on the significant and well-cited work of recent generations of feminist historians, including Hershatter's own exemplary research. The volume, written as a textbook, conveys abundant substance and resources for further reading and is both meticulously scholarly and extremely readable. On these grounds alone, it will shape the next generation of historians of China.

The book's second and key thematic strand – gender analysis – provides a rigorous and original scholarly interpretation woven throughout its account of the social and cultural history. The dimension of this work that is especially noteworthy is its sustained attention to the political symbolism through which Woman (Hershatter's capitalization) is constructed and debated and through which the lives of actual women are drawn into the revolutions of the era, and into their preludes and aftermaths. This includes women's own and diverse expressions in written work and in lived action. And it also includes the powerful and shifting senses in which the voices of men have constructed and deployed images of Woman as a vehicle for political and national discourses, ones in which women themselves were not inevitably the priority. The interwoven exploration of these strands gives depth and complexity to the oft-observed conception of the state as family writ large and of the family as microcosm of the state. Competing conceptions of Woman appear both as focused on women's lives within this layered hierarchical order, and as a metaphorical means of personalizing and engendering discourse about the Chinese nation and its place in the world, whether as lament or as aspiration.

To achieve this, Hershatter departs from the gendered tensions and deepening fractures of the modern era to show how women actively participated in revolution from the Taiping era onwards, and how some of the key revolutionary issues were concurrently intensely gendered in the discourse of Woman – notably land rights and marriage reform. Women's issues and Woman issues were both drawn intensely into militarized conflicts that were often long-lasting and imperfectly resolved through to the middle of the 20th century, amid devastating costs. Liberation was followed with a continuation of the same gendered themes and concerted campaigns directly affecting women – marriage and family law reform, the training and provision of midwifery, and opposition to prostitution. Significant gendered changes for women and men in access to work, material and symbolic resources, services and mobility concurrently altered women's lives in China in comparably fundamental manner. Throughout these decades Woman persistently recurred in the campaigns, mobilizations and the relative stability of this era as a powerful marker of nation and of national values.

In Women and China's Revolutions, the concerns and fractures that made women and Woman central to China's revolutions are powerfully delineated, together with the courage, work, achievements and sacrifices women made for their liberating visions in China's revolutions. The volume concludes with an up-to-date account of the present era (to 2018) and its percolating mix of stability and dynamism. Readers are left, as we should be, with deeply informed and thought-inspiring questions.