Recovering the history of China's revolutionary and collective period – as lived in the crucible of the countryside – has long been a central focus of international scholarship on China. For the revolutionary period, there are only a small handful of contemporary field-based international accounts, including the classics of the northern interior penned by William Hinton and by Isabel and David Crook. For the collective period, there is a much larger body of historical and social science work that has meticulously reconstructed the series of campaigns and transformations of the 1950s and 1960s, often as a prelude to more contemporary research. The careful and path-breaking scholarship involved in these bodies of literature makes it no small statement to say that The Gender of Memory is a work that dramatically remakes this field and the questions that scholars of China will be asking for years to come.
Through a series of fieldtrips from 1996 to 2006, Gail Hershatter and her colleague and collaborator, Gao Xiaoxian (who is working on her own volume about women's domestic and reproductive labour), interviewed roughly one hundred women in four geographically separated counties in southern and central Shaanxi. These women were of an age to be able to recount the rural social and political changes of the 1940s and 1950s from their own personal experience; several had been centrally positioned and active in those years, and occasionally later, as political leaders and labour models. Elements from these women's life histories in their own words are woven together with their aggregate recorded memories, and are juxtaposed provocatively with official or generally accepted histories of the same years.
As befits an historian, the treatment of time is especially rigorous and revealing. While it will not be new to readers who have interviewed rural people on the events of those years to find that Hershatter's interviewees rarely referred to the formally named campaigns with which we are familiar, the care given in listening and in analysis has been revealing. Hershatter identifies the externalities of what she terms “campaign time” and carefully deconstructs it using the local and specific memories of women as systematically pinpointed through reference to the animals corresponding to the birth year of the women's children. The women's memories as presented here powerfully evoke the immediate practical challenges of changing life in each village under conditions that were always arduous and frequently tragic. They also underline the centrality of women as leaders of these changes – recruited as being among those whose lives had been hardest in previous years (especially those married as small daughters-in-law), as essential providers and leaders in the absence of so many men lost in war and social upheaval, and as a critical labour resource. Their stores are replete with accounts of balancing both campaign time and domestic time, for their community contributions had to be managed in addition to their duties as breadwinners and caregivers essential to family survival. And respected performance of their domestic roles was indispensable to their practical and moral ability to serve as path-breakers and mobilizers.
The stories also powerfully undermine received wisdom about the roles of women and especially about women's presumed confinement to an inner sphere. In addition to underlining the important implications of women's normative exogamy, creating ties between families and communities that were sometimes at a distinct distance, Hershatter presents story after story of forced migration (from famine and war) and of labour migration during the 1940s, and of women's pervasive presence in market places buying and selling the thread and cloth that clothed and supported their families, as well as occasional other ventures into petty trade. Well before organized mobilization of women for agricultural work, young widows and women with absent husbands were doing all manner of agricultural work including ploughing the land. Attention to these memories reveals a transition that was not one of entry into the outer sphere or the public work force, but rather a revaluation of their public labour from being the skilled and necessary work of impoverished women to being a valued and normative contribution to the public and gradually collective economy. The negotiation of this threshold included the enormous double burden women shouldered (near invisibly in the official histories), the pressures for personal sacrifice to be model daughters-in-law and virtuous widows, and the never-fully-resolved challenge of obtaining equal workpoints for their public labour. The richness and complexity of gendered life in rural China emerges with vitality and ever-shifting specificity as voiced memory unfolds.
Invaluable as the memories themselves are, woven selectively through the text, this volume is more than an excavation of oral history. The women's memories are matched with archival, historical and ethnographic records to explore connections, add dimensions of gender and lived experience, present and examine the women's own knowledges and voices about the events of their lives, and unsettle previous ideas about China's rural transformations. Hershatter pointedly shifts away from the question of what the Chinese revolution did for Chinese women to ask, “Would China's revolution have been possible without the visible and invisible labor of Chinese women?” (p. 266) Hershatter's close listening, insights and meticulous methodology make this volume a contribution to Chinese history and, in its recurrent reflections on voices, memory and knowledge, a contribution to the challenging work of oral history more generally.
The concluding section traces the later history of the women whose voices were heard in earlier chapters. This, too, is a challenging reconstruction of a gendered past and present, for the women who laboured so hard and created so much in earlier years have little place in the narratives of the present or very much comfort as elderly in China's remote rural interior. Nevertheless, it is scarcely possible to imagine how China's present could have been fashioned without the peace, stability and foundations laid by these generations of women. The Gender of Memory is not only a story of China's past but a gift of restless questions for the present.
