Changing Identities of Chinese Women: Rhetoric, Experience and Self-Perception in 20th Century China

This beautifully-written and sophisticated study of Chinese women will strike a chord with readers of Wild Swans and the work of Julia Kristeva. It describes how it actually feels for women to live with the rhetoric of prescribed female qualities, and the gap between that rhetoric and experience. Drawing on vivid self-portraits, personal narratives and remembered moments of girlhood, it describes the changing reality of women's lives during China's republican, revolutionary and reform eras. It looks at how their experience of the Cultural Revolution and other moments of China's history has diverged from the experience of men, and how, today, a new image of 'femininity with Chinese characteristics' is emerging.