The turn of the twentieth century, Joan Judge argues, should be viewed as a key moment in the unfolding of Chinese modernity. Whereas May Fourth thinkers tended to look at China's past in a categorically antagonistic manner, Chinese in the late Qing engaged in divergent reappraisals of its historical roots and varied appropriations of foreign models. They produced a more intricate blend of cultural formations than the “tradition–modernity” dichotomy of May Fourth. As in the May Fourth era, ideas of woman, history, and nation were intertwined, and the “woman question” and the question of history acquired a central place in understanding its politics.

Judge's study focuses on women's biographies. Her sources include official documents, didactic materials, new-style textbooks, polemical essays, women's journals, and collections of Chinese and Western women's life stories. The book is organized around three themes in women's lives: virtue, talent, and heroism. Rather than adopting the familiar and implicitly political terms “progressive,” “conservative,” and “radical,” Judge discerns four “chronotypes”— “eternalist,” “meliorist,” “archeomodern,” and “presentist.” These categories, reflecting a broad range of historical, political, and gender views, highlight the different experiences of temporality that each category embodies.

Among the three themes, the discussion of virtue deserves special mention. It looks at how the four chronotypes dealt with the ideal of female chastity. While eternalists strictly adhered to the age-old ideal, both archeomodernists and presentists either ignored it or dismissed it as total nonsense. It is the meliorists, Judge tells us, who addressed the issue most thoroughly, carrying on an intellectual tradition dating from the late Ming that treated the issue critically and thoughtfully. As cases of women killing themselves to live up to expectations of chastity continued to occur in the late Qing, it appears that the meliorists' more engaged approach might have spoken more sensibly to the situation of women. The question here is not just how to relate to China's past, as Judge rightly points out, but also how to address the everyday reality of many women. Moreover, the “regime of virtue,” constraining as it was, could also be used as a source of female moral capital to promote new-style education, as seen in the story of a thirty-six-year-old widow in 1905 (pp. 36–37). During this period, the “old” and the “new” were entangled, and the old could be resignified to serve the needs of the new. An iconoclastic rejection of the past, typified by the May Fourth activists who would appear on the scene a decade later, Judge argues, failed to make good use of the resources in their own cultural heritage.

On the whole, the choices of the four chronotypes work effectively to articulate Judge's thesis. This approach, while bringing out the cultural and historical tendencies of the various positions, also tends to downplay the importance of politics in a period of profound political transformation. This problem manifests itself most noticeably in the third part of the book, which concerns heroism. Heroism, Judge argues, took on unprecedented salience in the national crisis of the late Qing. The presentists celebrated most women warriors as new heroes, Chinese and Western, and, not surprisingly, they also regarded Confucian tradition in the most negative light. What is not clear, however, is whether the presentists' enthusiastic advocacy of female militancy was purely an intellectual conviction, or a reflection of their political affiliations, at a time when Sun Yat-sen's Revolutionary Alliance was actively promoting its cause. More political and social contextualization is needed throughout the book to help the reader understand the position each chronotype represented and appreciate their differences.

At the turn of the twentieth-first century, China faces enormous challenges in a new global age. “History” once again becomes polysemic and mutable, used by various forces to promote their causes with a wide range of political or even geopolitical implications. The “woman question,” interestingly, does not assume as prominent a place in the national psyche as it did a hundred years ago. The opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games is a telling case in point: By highlighting the “Confucian” ideal of “harmony,” the organizers portrayed China as a civilian, cultured, and peace-loving country, represented mostly by “scholarly” men. Women, meanwhile, have resumed their subordinate and decorative role, which would most likely upset some of the people featured in the book. Judge's study, carefully researched with thoughtful and nuanced analysis, is timely and offers great insight into one of the most critical questions in China today: How to make sense of and make use of China's past? Much can be learned from the thoughtful efforts at the turn of the twentieth century.