This book explores the rise of women's Yue opera in the 20th century and examines the historical context and human relationships that have shaped this popular social and cultural phenomenon. The author, Jin Jiang, not only scrutinized historical archives, but also conducted extensive interviews with actresses and audience members of women's Yue opera, whose stories revealed the world of a large segment of the Shanghai female population in the middle decades of the 20th century.

Jin Jiang intimates that for most of the 20th century, the modern Chinese political leadership disregarded popular culture because of its private, mundane and trivial concerns. Moreover, popular culture was denigrated by the elite; and women's opera was stigmatized due to the prevalent bias against women and women's culture. Between the agenda of the political leadership and the bias of the elite, there was a paucity of voices of women, and women were rendered subalterns in this part of the history. Jin Jiang intends to fill this gap with this research on the experiences and stories of the actresses and audiences in women's Yue Opera.

Jin Jiang, through her study, intends to underscore that women were cultural builders and historical agents. Through an examination of the opera, actresses and female audience in modern Shanghai, Jin Jiang explores how Yue opera shaped the social status and identity of the female producers and consumers, how these women made history as they made Yue opera a success, and how these women elevated their “feminine” concerns as significant as the “masculine” public discourse on nationalism and modernity.

The book offers a narrative of the historical development of the opera from its origin in Shengxian's countryside in the late 19th century to its establishment in Shanghai in the 1930s. Key to its development was the transformation of the opera from rural to urban and from male to female. In the book, the author examines the rise of the feminine opera in Shanghai's public places in the middle decades of the 20th century, the challenges Yue opera actresses faced and their efforts to overcome them, female patrons and patronage, and the remaking of lowly female entertainers into artists and public icons in the city's mass media through its ability to build a core of upper- and middle-class patrons.

As Jin Jiang intimates, the actresses used to be subject to public erotic fantasy, sexual scandals, and gossip. A popular movie star Ruan Lingyu, for instance, committed suicide over the slander in an attempt to prove her morality; as she wrote in her suicide note, “my body is pure and clean” (p. 60). Indeed, as the author states, actresses were caught between the conflicting demands of a public culture of erotica and a reformist discourse. The former conceived them as sexual objects due to the conflation between actress and courtesan and their sexually suggestive performance. The latter promised them social status as long as they could differentiate themselves from prostitutes. Actresses' lack of social support networks, shortage of economic resources, and low literacy severely limited their cultural and political horizons.

The all-female troupes through cross-dressing performances developed a new feminine mode of expressing sexual themes that replaced crude sexual scenes with refined, sentimental expressions of love and desire and patriotic plays to raise its status in the urban market. In so doing, they turned the opera into a master theatre of the modern love drama and an urban theatrical spectacle. The patriotic messages embedded in the romanticized and dignified love stories not only won political legitimacy for the opera, but also appealed to middle-class and female audiences.

As Jin Jiang contends, this represents a key struggle in the women's overall fight for economic survival, respect, human dignity, sexual autonomy, and social status. As a result of this struggle, the women transformed themselves from lowly female entertainers into modern artists through the support of a large middle-class female audience, left-wing intellectuals, and through their transformation of the opera from a bawdy peasant form into a refined and socially meaningful urban theatre. The women of Yue opera, most importantly, not only rectified and elevated the feminine as of equal importance as the masculine, but also employed the culturally defined feminine values to challenge male dominance and empower themselves.

The author argues that through portraying private feeling and mundane experiences as major themes in artistic representations of modern life, women of Yue opera expressed modern urban feminine aspirations through the aesthetics and narratives of Yue opera. Such expressions represented the rise of feminine power in Shanghai and in Chinese society in general. This book should be welcomed by scholars in Chinese gender studies.