At Home in the World grew out of Xia Shi's PhD dissertation, supervised by Kenneth Pomeranz and Jeffrey Wasserstrom at the University of California, Irvine. It designates what the author calls “married non-professional women without modern education” as protagonists, to present their charitable deeds during the period from the 1870s to the 1930s. After decades of studies of women's history, this large cohort of urban middle-aged or older married women – most of whom were illiterate and most of whom lived a life focused on the household – still has not received much scholarly attention; in the author's words, this is because of “historians’ amnesia” (p. 6). Shi's study fills part of this important gap in the fields of women's history, gender studies and social history.
The book has three parts. Part one starts with an account of women of scholar-official family backgrounds who engaged in various charities involving disaster relief, women's education, and mobilizing women in the nationwide citizens’ donation movement in the late Qing. Shi points out that the new social milieu of the time started to value these activities. In one case, a Manchu widow committed suicide for failing to raise funds to continue a girls’ school. Honouring her death as a “sacrifice” to the cause of women's education represented a significant departure from the traditional notion of chastity that praised women primarily for their individual virtue of abstinence. Case studies of two prominent female philanthropists (chapter two), both of whom were well known in the early 20th century, further illustrates a newly emerged sense of citizenship among elite women in their charitable activities.
Part two uses YWCA sources to tell the story of the organization's reaching out to “middle-class” women through various committee works and other activities to help waken women's sense that they had a role outside home, foster the idea of social service, improve women's leadership abilities and promote adult women's education. It also examines various interactions that women had with the YWCA, including fundraising and networking, both of which were new to women, and describes how the involvement of these women helped indigenize the YWCA's local branches, often by way of transforming leisure into social service.
Lower down the social spectrum, in part three the author deals with a more grassroots organization known as Daoyuan (the School of the Way), established in 1921. The focus of the discussion here is on a women's branch of the organization in Shandong province. The Daoyuan regarded women's participation in public charity and social service mostly as “an extension and manifestation of their inner benevolence, rather than seeing it as a separate public realm into which women should enter” (p. 190). The Nationalist government despised and partially banned the organization and its activities as superstitious. Nevertheless, Daoyuan's charity wing, the Red Swastika, gave its members – mostly older married women – a reason to go out of the home and a venue to participate in and express their devotion to charity.
The book brings a fresh look at the so-called home women (as the YWCA called them) and their activities in and aspirations for social service. While the expression “housewife” is now out of date in English, Shi interchangeably uses phrases like “home women,” “homemakers” and “women in the home” to convey the Chinese notion of jiating funü, which, with a more positive connotation, is also synonymous with jiating zhufu (lit., “leading woman in the family”). Although the book's extensive glossary does not include these phrases, this study is clearly a pioneering work on Chinese jiating funü with a particular focus on their involvement in charities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Unlike many previous studies of women's history in which men are either entirely missing or presented as the suppressive others, Shi's study presents a gender-integrated model of social and national duty (p. 64). As she points out, one cannot fully understand how women's “public activism played out without analyzing the familial, social, and collective agency they accrued from the men in their lives” (p. 94). Her case studies pay rare attention to the encouragement of male family members and the “significant role men played as enablers” in the process. She analyses how reform-minded brothers and husbands in gentry families wielded influence in these women's lives and, in the case of Daoyuan, played a key role in helping turn women from diverse locations into members of charitable organizations (p. 167). This gender-integrated approach makes the book a balanced and thoughtful contribution.
In the crisis-ridden years that the book covers, the great majority of Chinese women (and men) constantly struggled to make ends meet; women who were able to participate in charitable organizations and activities were a tiny minority. The gentry family women were a “solid elite,” but the other two groups were also far from being average members of society. In the 1930s, the heyday of the YWCA in China, the organization's total membership was 4,390, of whom 45 per cent were “women in the home” (pp. 98–99). Given that the Chinese population was well over 400 million, these women by any measure were a small group. The membership lists of the women's branch of Daoyuan included 59 members in Qingdao in 1934 and 37 in Jinan in 1930 (p. 165). The population of these two cities at the time numbered in the hundreds of thousands (Qingdao in 1933: 179,033; Jinan in 1929: 379,549) – hence, women in these organizations constituted a tiny minority.
Shi's painstaking work on these women's charitable activities offers us a glimpse of a slice of social history that had otherwise remained hidden. It also reminds us of the inequality that still haunts the study of history in general and of women's history in particular. When it comes to the common people, we still know relatively little about the vast majority, especially women, whose lives came and went without leaving a written trace for historians.
