The demands of revolutionary society, the social and ideological turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, and the rapid economic growth of the Dengist era have all had important and sometimes disturbing impacts on private and family life in China. For this study of daughter–mother relationships, Harriet Evans interviewed educated professional women born between the 1950s and the 1980s about their childhoods and in particular about the way they had been mothered. When her interviewees were themselves mothers she also discussed the way they were bringing up their own daughters. This methodology made it possible to highlight the way intimate family life, gendered expectations and the reproduction of the evolving gender order were affected over time by changes in the political climate and in social and cultural expectations.

Evans organizes her subjects' memories of growing up around a number of carefully chosen themes: separation, communication, discrimination and son preference, the boundaries of life inside and outside the home, the gendered body, and filiality. During the Maoist era, in the name of gender equality, educated professional women (like their husbands) were often assigned to posts far from their homes leaving their children in the care of grandparents or nannies. In the Cultural Revolution years, separation became an ever more common experience for urban children as their parents were sent for prolonged periods to the countryside. Evans's chapter “Lives apart” reflects the sense of bitterness and loss felt by the daughters who grew up without their mothers. While some expressed sympathy with the pressures and conflicts their mothers must have experienced, many seemed resentful, blaming them for the maternal neglect they had suffered. Unfortunately, as only the daughters were interviewed, the voices of the mothers were missing. It would have been interesting to hear how they looked back on their lives. Evans contrasts the effects of these “brutal family disruptions” of the Mao decades with the sometimes prolonged separations in the reform era occasioned by the desire of women to further their education and to develop their professional careers. Surprisingly, she reports that these absences were not resented in the same way as those brought about by the revolutionary imperatives of the past; rather they were seen as an ordinary part of growing up.

The chapter “Difference and discrimination” contains fascinating accounts of growing up female in a society in which, although the official ideology is one of gender equality, son preference and belief in male superiority are still the norm. The attitudes of some of Evans's own subjects demonstrate the same ambiguity. Mothers and other caregivers subscribe to a system of male superiority both in the way they fulfill their roles as wives and mothers, and in the instructions they give their daughters. Yet, at the same time, they urge their daughters to study hard, to achieve and to look forward to professional careers. Many of the daughters confessed to feeling that boys are better than girls while simultaneously assuming that they were the equals of their male classmates and should have equal chances. Their narratives attack and contest discrimination while frequently upholding a traditional view of gender difference that belongs to the same belief system as that discrimination. Evans's account makes a major contribution to our understanding of the tenacity of gender inequality and the way in which it can mutate from one historical context to another, while allowing some essential features to survive.

This fine study is all the more welcome because the patriarchal and patrilineal characteristics of the Chinese family have tended to dominate studies of Chinese kinship while mother-daughter relationships have been comparatively neglected, with some notable exceptions of which Evans makes excellent use. The women whom Evans interviewed were all determined to be better mothers to their daughters than their mothers had been to them and to achieve greater closeness and intimacy. As Evans herself states, it remains to be seen whether they will be able to fulfill such desires. It would be interesting to make a follow-up study of this group and their daughters to explore the extent to which they really depart from the norms and practices of which they are critical but by which they were also formed.