Women's History and Biography

Books reviewed in this article: Helen M. Hopper, A New Woman of Japan: A Political Biography of Kato-Shidzue Delia Jarrett-Macauley, The Life of Una Marson 1905-65 Cynthia Nelson, Doria Shafik, Egyptian Feminist: A Woman Apart Judith Olmstead, Woman Between Two Worlds: Portrait of an Ethiopian RuralLeader Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life     

The Gendering of the British Working Class

How have feminist historians transformed the account of class formation and consciousness articulated in Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class? Deborah Valenze’s The First Industrial Woman, Anna Clark’s The Struggle for the Breeches, Sonya Rose’s Limited Livelihoods, and Ellen Ross’s Love and Toil place the gendering of the British working class at the center of the process and explain the peculiar limitations of the working-class movement. The essay also places these books in the theoretical tradition of socialist feminism and considers them as responses to Joan Scott’s call for a poststructuralist approach to gender, class and power.     

Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women's Biography in Chinese History

This volume brings together accounts of biographies of women covering a span of history from the Han dynasty to the mid-twentieth century.Its aim is to define and provide interpretive clues on the genre.It is,as the editors Joan Judge and Hu Ying point out,partly a study of epistemology,as many of the authors grapple with the issue of whether or not historians can claim to know the lives,including the inner worlds,of Chinese women through time,using biographical information.That seems to me a bit of a "straw wo/man," for knowledge of historical subjects is always mediated by sources.Nonetheless,the contributors,writing from the perspective of history or literature studies,bring a wide variety of viewpoints to bear on questions of the usefulness of women's biography for understanding changes in society,and in the process introduce some fascinating Chinese women.     

“新妇女史”在中国大陆的兴起

近年来,妇女史研究在中国大陆出现了一种前所未有的繁荣局面,一些学在受到女性主义思想启迪之时,同时运用新社会史的方法来研究妇女史,使中国的妇女史研究呈现出不同于西方的特色。笔用“新妇女史”这一概念来指称今天中国大陆的妇女史研究,并且通过统计分析,对近十多年来中国的妇女史研究理论与实践进行了评介。