商品詳細

Much more is known about prescribed female qualities, be they Confucian, Communist, or culturally Chinese, than about how it actually feels for Chinese women to live with that rhetoric and with the gap between rhetoric and experience. Based on self-portraits, personal narratives and remembered moments of girlhood, this daughter-centered study focuses on the changing reality of female lives during the country's republican, revolutionary and reform eras. Corresponding to these three periods, the process of becoming a woman in China seems successively to have been in opposition to, in imitation of and now different from that of their male counterparts. Today, preoccupations with fashion and the cosmopolitan have initiated a search , embracing a cross-cultural image of "femininity with Chinese characteristics" reminiscent of earlier decades this century. Combining the historical and contemporary, this book is also a personal accumulation of the author's own moments of reflection from more than 20 years of interaction with women in China as they have pursued revolutions within their society, their communities, their families and now themselves.