This examination of the gender legacy of the Mao era is structured around the life stories of four women, starting with a 50-year-old called Lin who grew up under the mark of the Maoist funü. The second story is Dong's, a migrant worker from the countryside living in Beijing, born in 1977, supplemented by Feng's, another migrant woman. The third is the only story from a figure who already has a public reputation, Shitou, a lesbian artist who was born in 1969. The last story is of Anne, a middle-class urban woman born in 1971 of wealthy, well-established parents who were extremely aspirational for their daughter. Overall, Huang's aim is to examine the intersections between them for what they reveal about the complex relationship between women's shifting gender identification, the women's movement in China and the legacy of what Huang calls “Maoist women's liberation.” The topic is an important one, for it signals an invitation to situate our understanding of the growing gender differentials in contemporary Chinese society within its historical context.

To follow it through, Huang looks at the social and political environment in which each woman came of age, and at the language they used to talk about themselves and others, particularly their mothers. Lin's gender identification is torn between what Huang calls “traditional and Maoist gender models,” which privileged class in foregrounding the productive worker or peasant as the epitome of the socialist woman, and denigrated the domestic contribution of the older generation to the child care. Dong's narrative introduces a more nuanced and fresher discussion, of Dong's sense of shame about her rural upbringing, manifest in her distaste of certain clothes and her desire to be seen to identify as a feminine urban subject. Without the possibility of realising this desire, she turned to compensate for her “lack” by spoiling her daughter. Feng, on the other hand, compensated for her “lack” by claiming recognition as a good woman and filial daughter. Shitou, in chapter three, arrives in this analysis as a well-known lesbian artist, giving this chapter a different feel to the others, in that it permits an analysis of her interview material that draws as much on her artistic practice as on her narrative. The chapter traces Shitou's engagement with imagery from the Mao era, the neo-liberal market, and with themes from the global circulation of queer sexualities. Finally, Anne in the last chapter emerges as a neo-liberal gendered subject, whose privileged economic and social background grants her advantages of mobility and study abroad not available to the others. As a subject of privileged consumer choice, Anne reaches her early 30s after two marriages and life in the US, to find herself a successful businesswoman, but without any sense of purpose to her life.

Through these diverse narratives, the reader is taken through some of the major themes Chinese women of different backgrounds have confronted in the past half-century in their self-identifications as women. The result is uneven. Analysis is limited by a tendency to slip, without explanation, between the individual women's subjective experiences as narrated in interview and the discursive scripts of the time. This is paralleled by a tendency to jump between one historical moment and another without adequate analysis to link them. Moreover, a desire to theorize the material, while absolutely necessary, is often characterized by attention to concepts which may at first sight appear relevant, but which address such different historical and political environments that their value has to be more critically appraised. I do not think, for example, that Susan Bordo's and Julia Kristeva's discussions about femininity and shame add to our understanding of Dong and Feng.

An insistence on seeking conceptual models to analyse the data sometimes impedes access to the data itself. Hence, arguing that Lin's self-reflections in the 1980s – on the decades of her childhood and youth – can be usefully apprehended through reference to the suku model, obscures the language Lin used herself, and therefore our understanding of her subjectivity, and de-historicizes suku out of the political and social environment for which it was intended and formulated. After all, the official and popular media environment in the 1980s was dominated by a tendency to critique the scars left by the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. So was everyone taking up the suku model? Or again, interpreting Anne's trajectory through the polarized binary positions of China/the West, restrictions/freedom, may well have corresponded with the terms Anne used in her self-positioning, and this in itself would be a matter for discussion, but it is unclear in Huang's narrative whether such binaries correspond mainly with Anne's language or are the result of the author's analytical choices.

Many important questions are raised in this book, but answers to them are limited by an analytical focus that follows its biographical structure. As it is, we are given glimpses of how the legacy of gender in Mao's China might be lived and experienced in different women's lives, but we are not much nearer to understanding how it might explain today's retreat from the gender transformations of the early PRC. As a result, the author's aim to examine what these narratives say about the shifting contours of China's women's movement since the middle of the 20th century is not realized.