Elizabeth LaCouture's Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860–1960 does several critically important things. It puts the material world at the forefront of analysis of historical change in Tianjin from 1860, when the first foreign concessions were established, until 1960. It looks at the ways in which transformations of ideas about gender and the family are implicated in and affected by changes in the material world. And it attempts to go beyond the ideological to examine how things actually changed for upper-class families in Tianjin. The lens that LaCouture uses to look at questions of modernity, gender, and social transformation is the built city, the private residences that made up that city, and the journals that provided instructions as to how one ought to live in and make use of those residences. LaCouture concludes, in an epilogue, that “a history of family, house and home in twentieth-century China not only shatters the myth that capitalist prosperity is endowed by the state but also exposes the inequalities and unevenness with in how the state has delivered this prosperity and distributed its resources over time” (p. 267).

LaCouture argues that under the Qing, domestic architecture, at least that of the well-to-do, linked the family to the state and to the cosmos. But the devastation of the Boxer Rebellion and the fall of the dynasty caused a rupture in those connections. She explores the ways that the new material world of Tianjin reflected changing political and social contexts.

The new material world of Tianjin was complex. In the late nineteenth century, Tianjin was one of the most cosmopolitan places in the world. Nine foreign concessions occupied a significant swath of land in the city. As the city recovered from the devastation of the Boxer Rebellion, a number of architectural models were available to residents of the city. The various foreign powers in Tianjin used architecture as a way of projecting their imperial identities in that Chinese city, as LaCouture writes in her fourth chapter. As was the case in Shanghai, the vast majority of the residents of the foreign concessions were Chinese; foreign domiciles were not restricted to foreign persons. LaCouture makes the important point that the common belief that only foreigners were permitted to reside in the foreign concessions erases the well-to-do Chinese middle class from the twentieth-century history of Tianjin. As she writes, “Colonial-capitalist governments could not afford to base zoning regulations explicitly on race or nationality because they needed Chinese people to invest in, buy, and rent the new concession housing” (p. 96). She goes on to say that the foreign powers did keep Chinese workers out of the concessions, as a way of avoiding the crowded conditions that obtained in the Shanghai concessions.

LaCouture is quite clear that her work focuses on the upper classes, largely because that is where the documentation lies. And she has found interesting documentation—questionnaires of Tianjin municipal workers, which are not systematic enough for quantitative analysis but nonetheless provide interesting glimpses into their worlds, which LaCouture describes in her second chapter. These surveys suggest that despite the importance of the nuclear family ideal as a sign of modernity, the workers seemed to live with extended families. She reads advice columns that give us rich information on the texture of everyday life in chapter 6. One particularly interesting observation that LaCouture makes is that in journals that discuss (and picture) the “modern” house at length, there is virtually no reference to (not to mention representation of) the kitchen. LaCouture does not conclude that means food was not of concern to the female readership of those journals. Rather, she suggests that it indicates that servants prepared the food. The kitchen was thus not a site for modernity. One cartoon shows a modern woman in a kitchen, wearing high heels, looking perplexed and surrounded by cookbooks. A man (presumably her husband) and an older woman (her mother-in-law?) are looking on with a mixture of amusement and consternation (p. 212).

But attention to gender does not result in equality. LaCouture demonstrates that Chinese property laws benefited male property holders. In the Republican era, property laws “forged the political ideal that the single-family house was central to urban male citizenship.” Things did not get appreciably better under the People's Republic of China; she characterizes the property regime as “socialist patriarchy” (p. 267).

One might have some small quibbles with the book—LaCouture's use of the term “Neo-Confucian” is somewhat jarring. The decision to end the book in 1960, rather than with the establishment of the People's Republic of China is important, but one wishes that the discussion of post-1949 was a bit fuller. The epilogue, which deals with the explosion at Binhai, along the Hai River between Tianjin and the coast, is instructive in this respect, but one wishes for more. The volume has no Chinese characters, which one assumes was a decision made by the press, not the author.

These small quibbles aside, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of Tianjin, as well as the variety of ways in which what LaCouture calls the “colonial-capitalist regime” operated and the ways in which gender is implicated in those operations. It is a welcome addition to what we know about gender and social transformation in Tianjin, taking its place with Gail Hershatter's classic The Workers of Tianjin as well as Qin Fang's more recent book on women's education in Tianjin.Footnote ¹ These three works, taken together, give us a rich picture of gender in the important city of Tianjin among upper-class women, workers, and students.