The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past

(University of California Press) The author focuses on 72 elderly women in rural China (in the Shaanxi Province) during the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, examining socialism and how gender figured in its creation. Through this exploration, Hershatter shows how Party-state policy impacted all aspects of these women’s lives — from their work to their thoughts about virtue and responsibility. Hershatter is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.