Rich scholarship on gender in China has since complicated the picture of women in Chinese society, revealing the roles women have played as active agents in their families, businesses, and artistic communities. The essays in this collection go further by assessing the ways in which the study of gender has changed our understanding of Chinese history and showing how the study of gender in China challenges our assumptions about China, the past, and gender itself.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Terminology
• Chronology
• Introduction
• Part One - Early Modern Evolutions
• Chapter One - Les Noces chinoises: An Eighteenth-Century French Representation of a Chinese Wedding Procession - Ann Waltner
• Chapter Two - The Control of Female Energies: Gender and Ethnicity on China's Southeast Coast - Ann Waltner
• Chapter Three - Collecting Masculinity: Merchants and Gender Performance in Eighteenth-Century China - Yulian Wu
• Chapter Four - Writing Love: The Heming ji by Wang Zhaoyuan and Hao Yixing - Weijing Lu
• Part Two - “Cloistered Ladies” to New Women
• Chapter Five - “Media-Savvy” Gentlewomen of the 1870s and Beyond - Ellen Widmer
• Chapter Six - The Fate of the Late Imperial “Talented Woman”: Gender and Historical Change in Early-Twentieth-Century China - Joan Judge
• Chapter Seven - Moving to Shanghai: Urban Women of Means in the Late Qing - Yan Wang
• Part Three - Radicalism and Ruptures
• Chapter Eight - The Life of a Slogan - Emily Honig
• Chapter Nine - Bad Transmission - Gail Hershatter
• Glossary of Chinese Characters
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors