The Girl Who Burned the Banknotes: Rural Women, Memory, and China's Collective Past

Sponsored by The Barnard Center for Research on Women.

What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group—rural women—at the center of the inquiry? This year’s Women’s History Month lecturer, Gail Hershatter, will explore changes in the lives of women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Centering on the story of Zhang Chaofeng, a former child daughter-in-law, the talk explores the question of whether women had a revolution, examining the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.

Gail Hershatter is Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her books include The Workers of Tianjin, 1900- 1949, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s (with Emily Honig), Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai, Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century, and The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past. She is a past President of the Association for Asian Studies.