I'll begin by stating what is usually left to the last paragraph: The Gender of Memory should be on the syllabi for any and all courses dealing with China in the 1950s and 1960s, the history of Chinese women in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, historical methodology, and the social origins of China's post-Mao reforms. Based on interviews with 72 elderly women in several villages in central and south Shaanxi Province, and in-depth research in provincial and county archives and local gazetteers between 1996–2006, Gail Hershatter, in collaboration with Gao Xiaoxian, a senior Women's Federation official, politely demolishes any remaining vestiges of the stock images associated with the terms “rural women” and “the Chinese family”; unearths fascinating data about rural life beyond and in-between the “mind numbing list” (p. 3) of political campaigns (what she calls “campaign time”; p. 4); tells us, in intricate detail, what the Communist revolution, in all of its bizarre twists over the years, meant to women; and introduces important arguments about the role of women in providing the foundation for the post-Mao economic boom. Perhaps even more than among Western academics, for whom arguments about “agency” among rural women are not unfamiliar, I hope that this book receives wide readership in the PRC, precisely because it is there where so many intellectuals, working in and outside of the state, persist in denigrating the contributions of the rural sector to China's rise, and women's role in this in particular.
Hershatter's research strategy was shaped by her interest in “what socialism was locally, and for whom, and how gender figured in its creation” (p. 8). Similar to other landmark local studies on rural China (e.g. Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz and Mark Selden's Chinese Village, Socialist State [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991]) but with a laser-like focus on gender as the organizing category of analysis, Hershatter provides deep texture to what she aptly describes as the “featureless historical terrain” (p. 4) of the 1950s, a period also largely devoid of “cultural and social history” (p. 5) about it. She accomplishes this mainly by allowing women's voices to take center stage—the text is full of paragraph and multi-paragraph italicized citations to the interviews. Hershatter (and, of course, Gao) is a careful listener, and she is at her best transitioning between women's actions, the memories and narratives based upon them from the vantage point of the reform period (sometimes misremembered or selectively remembered), and the contrast between these and the state-imposed categories about them. For example, for the Party-state, 1949 was and remains the boundary between China's “old” and “new” society, but rural women sometimes categorized the Great Leap Forward period as the “old society,” or even the entire collectivist period; China's “new society” only began in 1979 (pp. 237, 263). Men, on the other hand, hewed more closely to the official chronology. In the state's narrative, it took enlightened, May Fourth Movement-inspired party members to break down the household door to release “feudal” women out into the world as productive laborers, but these Shaanxi women never had the opportunity to stay indoors in the first place (this was a sought-after privilege of the wealthy). Owing to the frequent absence of men who were working elsewhere, conscripted or on-the-lam from the military, poor women had no choice but to work in the fields, conduct trade, or escape marauding soldiers; danger was omnipresent. For a year or so after marriage as well, they moved back and forth between their husband's villages and their natal homes. For these women, the revolution did not mean liberation from the home, but rather that they were able to safely move about rural space without the shame of poverty, expanding their social and political worlds in the process. And unlike state officials who spoke of labor (but not housework or profitable crafts like needlework) as redeeming and liberating, women mainly remember their sheer utter exhaustion during the collective period, burdened as they were with many children (many were angry at the state for not introducing birth control in the 1950s), absentee men, and cooking, cleaning and the like. Many spent sleepless nights in barely lit rooms sewing clothes for four and five children. The usual cast of heroes and villains in liberation also gets altered in women's narratives. In the state's version, and, of course, in much of Chinese literature, mothers-in-law are the source of young married women's troubles, and it's the Women's Federation that rides in to the rescue, but in rural Shaanxi many women recalled the kindness of mothers-in-law and the unwillingness of Federation officials to assist them. In fact, for those who rose to become officials and labor models, maintaining good relations with mothers-in-law, as well as other traditional womanly virtues such as managing relationships, industriousness, and even refusing to remarry as a widow, were seen as necessary to serve the revolution, not “feudal remnants” that had to be discarded. Revolutionary women had to have proper traditional virtues to be effective leaders.
Even when Hershatter does not use women's narratives to challenge the official chronology and revolutionary narrative, her informants help fill the gaps left by the state's silence about women's role in economic development. Left out of most accounts of rural collectivization is the extent to which villages were “feminized” by the near absence of male labor, a phenomenon that persisted well beyond the chaotic war years. As one woman, Shan Xiuzhen, commented, “If women did not work, whom could you depend on to plant crops” (p. 146). For Hershatter, this “feminization of agriculture undergirded the rural economic development of the Mao years, supporting the central accumulation strategy of the Party-state” (p. 237).
By placing women's experiences of collectivization at the center, Hershatter can offer convincing explanations for reform-era policies as well, demonstrating just how important it is to break down the pre-and post-1978 border in academic scholarship. Why were older women so active in enforcing the one-child-per-family policy? Memory was critical here. Recalling their exhaustion in the 1950s and early 1960s, older women “feel, passionately, that it was difficult to support and care for many children property” (p. 207). How could the rural economy have “taken off” without the “human capital” of women, who accumulated experience and skill in managing households, budgets and engaging in agricultural and sideline labor, all of which made it possible for men to stay in more remunerative jobs outside of the village? (Here, I think, it might have been useful to draw comparisons to women in rural India who did not experience revolutionary changes). According to Hershatter, women's labor and developed skills surely played an important role in “laying the groundwork for the post-Mao economic boom” (p. 265), even as these now elderly women suffer from increasingly widespread neglect. The accounts of elder abuse and suicide during the reform period (pp. 277–87) are tragic and harrowing, and should be enough to dispel pat notions of the “Chinese family value” of respect for the elderly.
Despite its title, this book should not only be read as a study of gendered memory, or history from the vantage point of a “doubly marginalized group” (p. 6). It is also important for the perhaps more old-fashion understanding of historical research: the introduction of new data into the scholarly record. Hershatter and Gao mined the Shaanxi Provincial Archive as well as several archives at the county level to great effect—revealing not only the chasm between the claims of propagandists and what actually happened in different villages, but also between the memories of their informants and the written historical record. Scholars who write about the 1950s as a period of “liberation,” “centralization” or “state penetration” into rural communities will be interested in evidence of rural suicides, deaths from starvation and the sale of children in 1951, the lack of significant land redistribution during Land Reform, and the fact that only 5–10% of rural women were using new-style midwifery, resulting in the continuation of local practices such as feeding babies a dried rat's fetus to cure neonatal tetanus, an illness that persisted into the 1970s. It is important to know that in Shaanxi illiteracy remained widespread even among cadres and their families because of poverty and the lack of time to go to class or study; that measles and meningitis killed children well into the 1960s; and that, in 1961, some 30% of all children ages 1–5 had no one to care for them at home; during the summer harvest that year, “more than a hundred children across the province had been bitten by wolves or drowned” (p. 250). This book, then, is an excellent reminder that big concepts and grand narratives, whether produced by states or scholars, rarely capture the complexities revealed by local archival sources and oral history.
On occasion, the level of complexity and attention to detail in this book can overwhelm; Hershatter and Gao do confess to an “attachment to endless detail” (p. x). I did find myself wondering, sometimes verging on astonishment, just how older women were able to recall anything that happened in the 1950s with such specificity, including a detailed conversation with a precociously verbal two-year old (p. 250); for my part, I will confess to barely remembering the back-and-forth of conversations that took place two days ago with my teenagers. I should also note that many of these detailed memories were produced by women who did eat much bitterness, but overall had achieved relatively privileged status in rural society thanks to the Party's support, including regional and national-level labor models (Cao Zhuxiang, Shan Xiuzhen and Zhang Qiuxiang), activists, and local Women's Federation cadres—a reflection of Gao Xiaoxian's official connections no doubt. It is these women's memories that the book is organized around, and whose voices tend to be the strongest. To what extent do these experiences and memories inform us about the larger universe of rural women beyond Shaanxi? Was the feminization of agriculture a Shaanxi phenomenon or one that occurred elsewhere as well? Perhaps a less-detailed but more explicitly comparative approach, including an examination of the literature on Soviet collectivization, might have produced a book with more generalizable conclusions. Even approaches that are avowedly and explicitly “local,” and do their best to capture “sensuous detail and emotional coloration” (p. 288), can include comparative analysis to worthwhile effect.
As a locally generated and nuanced study of one region in rural China, The Gender of Memory is perhaps best placed on the syllabus alongside similar local studies for contrasting analysis of gender. But as a study that reveals what is quickly becoming a lost world and successfully reorients our entire perspective about the possibility of history told with a different voice, this volume can stand alone as the gold standard.
