Women's History at the Cutting Edge

Karen Offen, Chen Yan, Karen Offen, Chen Yan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429671371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book considers the promise of women's and gender history for revolutionizing our understanding of the past while also acknowledging the current national political, financial, and other contextual realities that can (and do) constrain or promote the possibilities for researching and writing women's history. The editors assert that the promise of women's and gender history is a cutting edge field of research, "a revolutionary development in the politics of historical scholarship, " essential for understanding the human past. Further, they argue for the inseparability of women's history and gendered analytical approaches.

The contributors to the volume address questions including: what have been the achievements of women's and gender history over the past two decades? To what extent has it succeeded in making women's history an integral part of historical study rather than an optional specialist area? What impact has the study of manhood, masculinities, and men's gendered power had on our understanding of women's lives? What is the relationship between gender studies and new critical histories of colonialism and empire, contact zones, cross-cultural encounters, and racialization? How is new work on cultural geography and spatial categories impacting on our historical understandings of bodily difference?

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Women's History Review.

Women's History at the Cutting Edge: a joint paper in two voices

Chen Yan and Karen Offen

ABSTRACT

This is, as the subtitle indicates, a joint paper in two voices. Each author has worked with her counterpart to revise what began as their position paper for the Round Table ‘Women’s History at the Cutting Edge’ at the International Congress for the Historical Sciences, held in August 2015 in Jinan, China, which met jointly with the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (IFRWH). Chen Yan explains her perplexity about the reticence of Chinese historians (based in China) to embrace topics in women’s and gender history, using her own case as an example. She then poses five questions in the paper to stimulate reflections from the commentators, drawing on their varied experiences as historians of women and gender in other countries. Her particular objective is to ‘jump-start’ research and publication in these areas in China, where a variety of obstacles dissuade scholars from pursuing this path. Karen Offen’s contribution builds out from that of Chen Yan, arguing that women’s and gender history is at the cutting edge of historical research precisely because it offers ‘a revolutionary development in the politics of historical knowledge’. No historian can be considered ‘up-to-date’ in the field of history without taking its findings into account. Offen addresses each of the five questions, making provocative arguments and rehearsing some of the achievements in providing an organizational structure that welcomes historians from many lands through the IFRWH. She emphasizes the vast expansion of publications in the field during the last twenty-some years in many languages besides English and addresses the controversies of the 1990s concerning the ‘turn’ to gender history and to theoretical analyses. Offen then proposes thinking about ‘women’ and ‘gender’ as two focal points along the continuum of the same project, using the analogy of the ‘zoom lens’. Making women’s history an integral part of historical study requires a ‘gendered analysis’ of any historical topic, but it also requires deeper thinking about communication strategies that can bring the findings of our research to the general public.

Chen Yan

Sixteen years ago, when I was preparing the research proposal for my doctoral dissertation, my professor refused my naïve idea of choosing some female traitors during the anti- Japanese War (1931–1945) as the subjects of my thesis. He said earnestly that: Perhaps it’s an interesting topic, but we have many more important and meaningful topics that deserve your attention. In the end, I wrote my doctoral thesis on the diplomatic system of the Chinese government during the anti-Japanese War, which is a classic topic of ‘male-centered’ history, dealing with government affairs.

In 2015, I received a refusal letter from a top Chinese historical journal concerning my submission of an article that addressed questions of masculinity in the anti-Japanese war. I was told that one of the anonymous referees thought my article was ‘interesting’, but he preferred me to do some other more meaningful topics. My article investigated two items of gossip that spread like wildfire in Chongqin (the wartime capital of China 1937–1945) in the 1940s, and went on to discuss the complex and specious ‘affairs—Chinese first couples, some American special envoys’ and ‘relationships—between the Chinese and American government’. Already in 1970 we had learned that the personal is political, so how could it be that items of gossip and affairs would still be considered marginal topics in Chinese history?

Based on my personal experience, I realize that the study of women’s and gender history in China has stalled, so I proposed this roundtable, initially titled ‘What’s New for Women’s History? After Gender’, hoping for more feedback from Chinese and global historical circles, in order to locate (and possibly dislodge) the bottleneck in China. Dr Karen Offen from Stanford University became the co-organizer of this roundtable later, and we revised the title to ‘Women’s History at the Cutting Edge’. The irony is that the Chinese organizing committee of the CISH’s 22nd International Congress initially translated the title into Chinese and published it on their website as: ‘边缘中的妇女史— the Marginalized Women’s History’. I was shocked by the translation at first sight, then realized that our Chinese organizing committee could only understand this roundtable as ‘marginal’. In fact, it is definitely not a marginal topic, and we received many proposals for commentators from around the world, including some of the ‘founding mothers’ of women’s history in other countries. I still remember how excited I was to post the news on my Wechat (Chinese Facebook) when I received the application e-mail from Prof. June Purvis, founder and editor of the Women’s History Review in England.

In the final draft of our proposal for this roundtable, Dr. Karen Offen and I have raised five questions:

• (1) What have been the achievements of women’s and gender history over the past two decades?
• (2) To what extent has it succeeded in making women’s history an integral part of historical study rather than an optional specialist area?
• (3) What impact has the study of manhood, masculinities and men’s gendered power had on our understanding of women’s lives?
• (4) What is the relationship between gender studies and new critical histories of colonialism and empire, contact zones, cross-cultural encounters and racialization?
• (5) How is new work on cultural geography and spatial categories impacting on our historical understandings of bodily difference?

I can’t find any clues to answer these five questions, except for the first one. In her landmark article, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, the American historian Joan Scott said that, in its simplest recent usage, ‘gender’ had become, for some, a synonym for ‘women’.¹ And she tried to provide a more sophisticated understanding of ‘gender’. In fact, any number of books and articles whose subject is women’s history had substituted ‘gender’ for ‘women’ in their titles, and this is still going on today. Joan Scott criticized the use of this misapplied synonym, but unfortunately it still describes today’s reality in Chinese historical circles. In the 1990s, accompanying the organization of the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, the notion of ‘gender as a category of analysis’ was introduced into Chinese academia; at the same time, some Chinese historians, especially a group of women historians began to try ‘engendering’ Chinese history. But to date, this effort has not ushered in a gender turn for Chinese history.²

In 2008, Prof. Du Fangqin, one of the pioneer historians in women’s history, reviewed the development of Chinese women’s & gender history research. She divided the last thirty years into three periods: she characterized 1978 to 1989 as the revival period; 1990 to 1999 as the climax period; and from 2000 to the present as the practicing period. She also pointed out that, even though there are more research resources and external financial support available to historians in the twenty-first century, the development of theory lagged well behind the production of low-quality localized case studies.³

I agree in substance with Prof. Du’s points, so in my part of this article, I will focus on asking why, in China during the last twenty years, has women’s and gender history been turning in circles, becoming no more than a kind of self-entertainment.

I have to admit that, in China, gender history is still equated with women’s history, and that women’s history is still stuck, more or less, in the stage of ‘separate spheres’: women’s writing, family, marriage, famous women, elite men’s thoughts about women’s emancipation. There is little dialogue between women’s history and the mainstream (or the male-stream) of Chinese historical research. The published research results of women’s history in China seldom gets feedback from mainstream scholars. What’s more, we have not yet established an effective dialogue with global gender history. If the 1995 conference on ‘Engendering China: Women, Culture and the State’, held at Harvard University, opened the eyes of Chinese women’s historians, today, twenty years later, the historical study of women’s history is still blocked in a difficult start-up stage, with little or no momentum behind it. We need to analyze why that might be, and how we might gain momentum.

Sexuality studies and the history of sexuality, one of the important foundations and now a very lively field in gender studies in western academic circles (the relations of sexuality studies and gender studies is a long story, which I can’t go into here) is still absent in China. In an important article published in the United States in 2000, Prof. Susan Mann has analyzed why research on Chinese women did not stimulate much interest in the subject of men or male culture in Chinese history; one reason seems to be the absence of sexuality studies. Mann argues that:

In point of fact, historians of China have yet to develop a sustained interest in the study of sexuality, which has been the starting point for work on the history of men and of masculinity in European and North American studies.⁴

Prof. Mann does note some exceptions including the work of Keith McMahon, Frank Dikotter and Charlotte Furth. More recently, see the publications of Matthew Sommer.⁵ However, we cannot find any comparable results in the Chinese historical publications of the last fifteen years.

Some work has been published by writers outside of the historical profession. For example, Prof. Li Yinhe’s new book, Sexual Discourse Studies in People’s Republic of China (2014)⁶ proposed five reasons for the refusal of sexuality studies in China. The first reason is the still cautious respect for Chinese traditional culture, the masses being usually more conservative in this regard than the educated elites. The second reason is that as a revolutionary party, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) keeps to the sexual ‘normal’ formed in the pioneer days. The third reason is that Chinese cling to the old idea that ‘Food is the first thing for people’, sex is only a luxury. What is more, she says, the Chinese still believe that sex is for birth, not for happiness. Finally, Li Yinhe concludes that the control of sex has become the key means to control Chinese society.

Li Yinhe is China’s most famous sexologist and the love story of her and her transgender partner enlightens the commonsense of LGBT in Chinese mass media, but her findings are still subject to question. As a historian, I venture to disagree with his/her second reason in particular. Some historians, including Christina Gilmartin and Patricia Stranahan, have revisited the sexual relationship and women’s liberation in the CCP before 1949. Based on their research, it seems clear that the pioneer generation of the CCP were, in fact, engaging in more overt sexual behavior that, already in the 1920s, was seen as symbolic of liberation and revolution.⁷ But I couldn’t agree more with Lin Yinhe’s final conclusion, which sounds almost like a conspiracy theory. If sex, the most personal and (presumably) private activity of human beings, is under the control of CCP, then nothing that pertains to the state will be out of control. In recent years, it seems that the CCP have done just that. And, if this is indeed the case, it absolutely cries out for a historical analysis from a gendered perspective.

We historians also face some problems with publication, which have blocked the dissemination of research findings. During the last two decades, a series of books and articles in women’s and gender history have been translated from foreign languages, mostly from English, such as those in the Jiangsu People Press series, ‘Oversea China Book Series-Women Studies’ (海外中国研究丛书·女性系列), whereas there have been far fewer high-quality publications by Chinese scholars. The Introduction to Women and Gender History (妇女与社会性别史导论课程阅读文选, 2005) published by the Center of Women Studies of Tianjin Normal University is still the sole textbook to introduce the theories and case studies of gender studies on the edge. The Readings on Women’s History (中国妇女史读本, 2011) is a good textbook edited by three distinguished professors from mainland China, Taiwan and United States. Among these readings, over 50% of the articles are translated from English, and most of the Chinese authors are from Taiwan. Among the nineteen essays of the Readings, only three were written by historians in mainland China.⁸ We had to admit that in mainland China we have made less progress. Even compared to the situation of ten years ago, Chinese feminist scholars confront more troubles in publishing and circulating their findings. The translation into Chinese of the special issue of Gender and History: translating feminisms in China⁹ has been completed for three years, but the publishing house delays publication again and again due to issues concerning the ’correct political orientation’. Translating feminism in China presents critical examinations of both nationalism and feminism in Chinese history. Feminist historians are trying to redefine and remake both women’s history and women’s liberation, an intellectual project that will challenge those still-dominant narratives of modern Chinese history that center on party history, nationalism, and modernization. We have to admit as well that, in recent years, China’s leaders are tightening controls in publishing. Accordingly, the publishing houses have become simultaneously more calculating and more cautious.

These reasons do not entirely explain the blockage in the development of Chinese women’s & gender history. I am even more concerned that some of my former colleagues have abandoned women’s studies altogether. In the last twenty years, Chinese scholars have benefitted from many more resources within the Party-State System than did their predecessors. We have many more female professors in history than ever before, but—compared with when I was a graduate student a dozen years ago—they seem reluctant to mentor undergraduate and graduate students to explore new, micro, gender issues.

Finally, the question of how to cater to the ever-changing tastes of the Party and State has preoccupied many Chinese scholars, in history as in other academic disciplines. Unfortunately, in China, the issues surrounding women and gender, including their history, are still marginalized. I am not sure we can push forward if we can’t promote sexuality studies, but this is how it seems. I am also uncertain as to when or how China’s authorities will loosen their grip on ideology, mass media, and social movements.

Here is some good news and some bad news. Fortunately, I succeeded in publishing the stories of those female ‘traitors’ in my newbook,¹⁰ the dream of a graduate student finally realized after fifteen years. Unfortunately, fiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Women's History at the Cutting Edge: a joint paper in two voices
• 2 The Dangers of Complacency: women's history/gender history in Canada in the twenty-first century
• 3 The History of Women and Gender: French perspectives on the last twenty years
• 4 From Invisibility to Marginality: women's history in Romania
• 5 Women's History at the Cutting Edge in Japan
• 6 Women's and Gender Studies of the Russian Past: two contemporary trends
• 7 'A Glass Half Full'? Women's history in the UK
• 8 Women's History in Many Places: reflections on plurality, diversity and polyversality
• Index