Women's Studies 102, U.C. Berkeley
Spring 2001
Lara Freidenfelds
freidenf@fas.harvard.edu

Comparative Structures of Gender:
The United States and China in the Twentieth Century

"Man on top, woman on bottom (Nan shang, nu xia)." -- traditional Chinese saying

"Women can hold up half the sky! (Funu neng ding banbian tian!)" -- Chinese Communist slogan

"The present stirring times demand women at maximum capacity for work every day in the month—fit for any work at any time; and as increased knowledge demonstrates that their periodic incapacity may be laid aside, the world recognizes that women may be racially fit and at the same time economically efficient." – Clelia Duel Mosher, 1927

"[W]omen are still hearing from people like Edgar Berman, a physician and Democratic party functionary, who announced in 1970 that he would not like to see a woman in charge of this country at a time of national crisis because her ‘raging hormonal imbalances’ would threaten the life and safety of all." – Delancy, Lupton and Toth, The curse : a cultural history of menstruation

In both China and the United States, nations with dramatically different cultures and social structures, gender difference has been constructed through a variety of social institutions and mechanisms, and daily life is imbued with gendered meanings and practices. In both countries, the ways in which gender differences were defined and enforced in social, legal, scientific, political and economic contexts changed tremendously over the course of the twentieth century. This course will use both cultural comparison and historical analysis to examine a variety of ways that gender can be structured, and to consider how amenable those structures may or may not be to change. We will look both at how social institutions and practices produce gender difference, and at how assumptions about gender difference shape institutions and practices. As gender difference is often played out on the body, and most often naturalized in that context, examining bodily practices, sexuality and reproduction will be central to this course. While we will examine the construction of both female and male gender, we will largely focus on the impact of gender on women's lives.

Lectures are broken down into various topics, but the topics are tremendously interconnected, and a number of ideas and issues will come up many times during the course of the semester. For example, patterns of fertility, experiences of sexuality, and women's work clearly affect one another, and one cannot be well-understood without looking at the others. Readings are related to the lectures, but often cover different material. Students will be expected to integrate material from the lectures and the readings in written assignments.

Students' grades will be based on written assignments and classroom attendance and participation. Written assignments will include two 4-6 page take-home midterms and an 8-10 page final paper or project focusing on a theme from the course, involving outside research.

Two take-home midterms (25% each)

Final paper/project (40%) (due on scheduled final exam day)

Class attendance/participation (10%)

Required Books:

Wolf, Margery. Women and the family in rural Taiwan: Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1972.

Gilmartin, Christina K. Engendering China: women, culture, and the state. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Honig, Emily, and Gail Hershatter. Personal voices: Chinese women in the 1980's. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Melosh, Barbara. Gender and American history since 1890, Re-writing histories. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More work for mother: the ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Maxine Hong Kingston, The woman warrior : memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts. New York : Knopf, 1976.

Yung, Judy. Unbound feet : a social history of Chinese women in San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

* Coursepack (Available at Copy Central, on Bancroft)

Lectures:

Jan. 17: Introduction and overview

Jan. 22: What do we mean by "structure?" By "gender?"

Technologies of the Body: Footbinding and Corsets

* Mosher, Clelia Duel, Woman's physical freedom, New York: The Womans press, 1923 (selections).

* Greenhalgh, Susan, "Bound Feet, Hobbled Lives: Women in Old China," Frontiers 1977, 2(1): 7-21.

Jan. 24: Overview of 20th c. social history: U.S.

• Progressive movement (class-based constructions of gender)
• Birth control movement/socialism
• WWI
• Suffrage
• 1920s changes in attitudes towards sex, marriage, family
• Great Depression
• WWII (women in new roles in workforce)
• Cold War (focus on family, but women are still working outside home)
• Women's Movement/Civil Rights/Vietnam
• 1980s backlash

Recommended reference: Woloch, Women and the American Experience (2nd ed.)

Jan. 29: Overview of 20th c. social history: China

• urban/rural differences
• influence of colonialism
• Overthrow of Qing dynasty and establishment of Republic
• early women's movement/resistance to colonialism
• Japanese occupation
• Communist revolution
• Great Leap Forward
• Cultural Revolution
• reforms and opening

Recommended reference: Immanuel C.Y Hsu, The Rise of Modern China (Oxford University Press, 1995)

Jan. 31: Patterns of fertility over the course of the century

• considering relationships among fertility, economics, and cultural expectations, and meanings given to childbearing depending on who is having the child
• China: high fertility and mortality at beginning of century; drop in fertility during wartime; Mao's encouragement of high fertility, and his change of heart; fertility restriction campaigns, eventually leading to the one-child policy

• U.S: highest differential fertility at beginning of century, based on class and immigration status; more universal adoption of small families, though for varying reasons; 1950s temporary growth in middle-class families; race and class differences in fertility over the century

In Engendering China: White, Tyrene. "The origins of China's birth planning policy."

Feb. 5, 7, 12: Changing family structures

• pre-Revolution China: patrilineal and patrilocal; exchange of women; concubines; child brides; centrality of family to social and economic structures

• Revolution in China: challenge to traditional family forms
• 1950 Marriage Law, and subsequent additions
• Great Leap Forward reforms in household and child care

• China's One-Child Policy

• U.S.: diminishing size of family and growing focus on children; family as unit of consumption; exaggeration of family focus in 1950s; increase of alternate family forms (single parent household, household with two working parents, gay partners, etc.)

• Constrained choices in marriage and divorce in China and the U.S.

Wolf, Margery. Women and the family in rural Taiwan: Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1972 (chaps. 1-4, 7-12, 14)

* Chinese Marriage Law (1950)

Honig, Emily, and Gail Hershatter. Personal voices: Chinese women in the 1980's. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988 (intro, chaps. 3, 4, 5).

In Melosh: Linda Gordon, "Family Violence, Feminism, and Social Control" p. 282-308

* May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward bound: American families in the Cold War era. New York: BasicBooks, 1988 (selections).

Feb. 14, 21, 26, 28: Gendered division of work

• women's work at home/unpaid labor, distinguished from male marketplace

• traditional Chinese workshops, households, and agricultural labor
• American women in the household: always more to do

• women's work outside the home early in the century: necessity, choice, shame, pride?
• Socialist and feminist emphasis on paid labor as route to liberation

• temporary rearrangement of household and child care during Great Leap Forward

• "double burden": China and U.S.
• division of work by gender
• China: urban/rural distinctions in gendered construction of work

In Engendering China: Xiaoxian, Gao. "China's Modernization and Changes in the Social Status of Rural Women."

In Engendering China: Woo, Margaret Y. K. "Chinese Women Workers: The Delicate Balance between Protection and Equality."

Honig, Emily, and Gail Hershatter. Personal voices: Chinese women in the 1980's. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988 (p. 23-31, 39-40, Chap. 7).

Wolf, Margery. Women and the family in rural Taiwan: Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1972 (chap. 13).

In Engendering China: Hershatter, Gail. "Modernizing sex, sexing modernity: prostitution in early twentieth-century Shanghai."

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More work for mother: the ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave. New York: Basic Books, 1983 (selections).

In Melosh: Melissa Dabakis, "Gendered Labor: Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter and the discourses of wartime womanhood" p. 182-206

In Melosh: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Disorderly Women: Gender and labor militancy in the Appalachian South" p. 240-281

March 5, 7: Language and visual media as a means of structuring gender

• Linguistic gender structures early in the century (naming in China; Chinese woman as "inside person;" American women taking husband's name; etc.)

• Language and images as foci of reform in Chinese socialism and American feminism

• Linguistic resistance to reform
• changing images of women in the media

* Watson, Rubie S. "Named and the nameless: gender and person in Chinese society." American ethnologist 13 (1986): 619-631.

In Engendering China: Barlow, Tani E. "Politics and Protocols of Funu: (Un)Making National Woman."

Honig, Emily, and Gail Hershatter. Personal voices: Chinese women in the 1980's. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988 (p. 72).

In Melosh: Barbara Melosh, "Manly Work: Public Art and Masculinity in Depression America" p. 155-181.

In Melosh: Ellen Wiley Todd, "Art, The 'New Woman,' and Consumer Culture: Kenneth Hayes Miller and Reginald Marsh on Fourteenth Street, 1920-40" p. 127-154.

1ST MIDTERM HANDED OUT MARCH 5 IN CLASS; DUE MARCH 7 IN CLASS

March 12: Teaching gender/sex

• childhood learning

• Communist educational campaigns

Wolf, Margery. Women and the family in rural Taiwan: Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1972 (chaps. 5, 6).

Honig, Emily, and Gail Hershatter. Personal voices: Chinese women in the 1980's. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988 (p. 36-39).

March 14, 19: Practicing/performing gender/sex

• Performing gender in a traditional Chinese wedding ceremony

• Performing gender (or gender neutrality) in the Cultural Revolution (Iron maids, etc.)

• Performing gender under market socialism in China
• Performing gender in the early 20th century U.S.: variations on the "New Woman"
• Performing gender on U.S. TV in the 1950s
• Performing gender through various American "body projects"

Honig, Emily, and Gail Hershatter. Personal voices: Chinese women in the 1980's. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988 (p. 39-40, 41-51, 68-72).

In Melosh: Donna Penn, "The Meanings of Lesbianism in Postwar America" p. 106-124.

In Melosh: George Chauncey, Jr., "Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the Word War I Era" p. 72-105.

* Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. "From gender erasure to gender difference: state feminism, consumer sexuality, and women's public sphere in China." In Spaces of their own: women's public sphere in transnational China, edited by Mayfair Mei-hui Yang. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

March 21: Scientific conceptions of gender

• anatomy, hormones, genes (and how all these have been destabilized, at least to some degree)
• using science to justify rejection of Cultural Revolution gender reforms in China
• gender metaphors in science

* Emily Martin, "The Egg and the Sperm"

* Harriet Evans, "Defining Difference: The 'Scientific' Construction of Sexuality and Gender in the People's Republic of China," Signs 1995, 20(2): 357-394.

Honig, Emily, and Gail Hershatter. Personal voices: Chinese women in the 1980's. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988 (p. 13-23, 32-36).

April 2, 4: Constructions and experiences of sexuality and childbirth

• early 20th century experiences
• U.S. middle-class attempts to control sexuality of various "others" (working-class, minority, gay)
• changing to choosing one's mate; how was the choice supposed to be made? (companionship and class background in China and the U.S.)
• unmentionable sexuality in the Cultural Revolution; rising post-Mao discourse
• birth control technology
• sex and menstruation education
• childbirth moves from home to the hospital, for most in US and many in China
• regulation of pregnancy and childbirth -- medical/legal control

In Melosh: Joanne Meyerowitz, "Sexual Geography and Gender Economy: The Furnished Room Districts of Chicago, 1890-1930" p. 43-71.

In Melosh: Christina Simmons, "Modern Sexuality and the Myth of Victorian Repression" p. 17-42.

Honig, Emily, and Gail Hershatter. Personal voices: Chinese women in the 1980's. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988 (p. 51-67, 73-80, 113-122, 181-191, 202-204).

* Fraser, Gertrude Jacinta. "Modern Bodies, Modern Minds: Midwifery and Reproductive Change in an African American Community." In Conceiving the new world order: the global politics of reproduction, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, 42-58. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

* Ma, Hongnan, and Ed Rosenberg. "Learning womanhood in China." Anthropology and Humanism. 23, no. o. 1, 1998.

April 9: Health Care/Reproduction and the State

• China's One-Child Policy

• Eugenics in the U.S. and China

• Abortion debates in the U.S.

• U.S. Women's Health Movement

* Reagan, Leslie J. "When abortion was a crime : women, medicine, and law in the United States, 1867-1973.". Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997 (selections).

* Ann Anagnost, "A Surfeit of Bodies: Population and the Rationality of the State in Post-Mao China," in Ginsburg, Faye D., and Rayna Rapp. Conceiving the new world order: the global politics of reproduction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p. 22-41.

April 11: Legal reforms concerning the status of women

• China: marriage law
• China: equal pay for equal work
• China: property laws
• U.S.: contraception and abortion

• U.S.: property laws, divorce

• U.S.: sexual harassment

• U.S.: workplace discrimination

* 1950 Chinese Marriage Law

Honig, Emily, and Gail Hershatter. Personal voices: Chinese women in the 1980's. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988 (chap. 6, 8 -- on divorce and violence against women).

April 16: Women's Movements in China and the U.S.: What does it mean to be a feminist?

• first and second waves of American feminism
• May 4 Movement; women in the Communist Party; post-Mao feminism
• reactions/backlashes

In Engendering China: Gilmartin, Christina K. "Gender, political culture, and women's mobilization in the Chinese Nationalist revolution, 1924-1927."

In Engendering China: Li, Xiaojiang. "Economic Reform and the Awakening of Chinese Women's Collective Consciousness."

In Engendering China: Rofel, Lisa. "Liberation nostalgia and a yearning for modernity."

Honig, Emily, and Gail Hershatter. Personal voices: Chinese women in the 1980's. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988 (chap. 9).

2ND MIDTERM HANDED OUT APRIL 16 IN CLASS; DUE APRIL 18 IN CLASS

April 18: U.S. colonialism/marketing and its relation to Chinese social movements: early and late in the century

• reforms of footbinding, prostitution, concubinage; Chinese intellectuals' construction of oppression of women as one cause of weakness of nation
• China in the global market

April 23: China as an inspiration for U.S. feminism: the optimism of socialism, and the disillusionment

April 25: Chinese-American women: gender systems collide

Maxine Hong Kingston, The woman warrior : memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts. New York : Knopf, 1976.

April 30: Chinese-American women: intersections of gender, race and class in the United States

Yung, Judy. Unbound feet : a social history of Chinese women in San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 (intro, chap. 2-5).

May 2: Chinese-American women, special topic: menstruation

May 7: Looking back over the course and the century: summing up