Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China

Through a nuanced analysis of the relationship between mothers and daughters, this book addresses profound questions about the nature of gender, kinship, family life, and personal development in modern China. Harriet Evans”s highly accessible text, framed around a series of fascinating interviews, will be much appreciated by students of China as well as by general readers. — Charles Stafford, The London School of Economics and Political Science

Personal life in reform-era China attracts its share of scholarly attention, but no one has investigated mother-daughter relations―their inflection by Big History and generational change, their connection to the changing shape of gender. Harriet Evans is a scholar fully equal to this task. A discerning and original thinker, she is attuned to gender theory and attentive to the historical specificities of China. The Subject of Gender suggests new ways of thinking about women, emotional life, and historical transformation. — Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa Cruz

[Evans”] multigenerational approach historicizes motherhood and illustrates shifts in female subjectivity from the 1950s through the present. . . . Highly recommended.

Harriet Evans interviewed educated professional women about their childhoods and the way they were bringing up their own daughters. This methodology made it possible to highlight the way intimate family life, gendered expectations, and the reproduction of the evolving gender order were affected over time by changes in the political climate and in social and cultural expectations. This fine study is all the more welcome because the patriarchal and patrilineal characteristics of the Chinese family have tended to dominate studies of Chinese kinship while mother-daughter relationships have been comparatively neglected.

This is an incisive and highly articulate study of mother-daughter relations in contemporary China. . . . The Subject of Gender will be required reading for those with an interest in social change in contemporary China, comparative family systems, and mother-daughter relations. It offers vivid and innovative material to China-focused courses in anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and contemporary history.