Holding Up Half the Sky: Chinese Women Past, Present, and Future.

• Author: Lee, Haiyan
• Position: Book Review

Holding Up Half the Sky: Chinese Women Past, Present, and Future, Edited by TAO JIE, ZHENG BIJUN, and SHIRLEY L. MOW. New York: THE FEMINIST PRESS AT THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, 2004. Pp. xxxvi + 313, tables.

As women's studies programs become more or less mainstream on U.S. college campuses, courses bearing titles such as "Women in Asia," "Women in Chinese History," and "Women and Writing" have attained the dignity of staple offerings in liberal arts curricula. Riding on the triumph of the women's movements of the 1970s and largely shielded from the backlashes of the 1990s, such courses often pursue a double narrative of victimhood and sisterhood, emphasizing both women's oppression under the universal condition of patriarchy and women's courage and resourcefulness in taking control of their lives and resisting sexist ideologies and practices.

Except for a small number of reflexive, theory-oriented upper-level seminars concentrated in the humanities, women's studies courses tend to be designed and taught in the spirit of bridging the gap between scholarship and activism. They tend to be distrustful of French theory, particularly the deconstructive approach to gender identity, and tend to favor the politically more viable notion of sisterhood that holds out the possibility of transcending class, racial, and cultural divides. American and Japanese feminists have researched and written about Chinese women in this spirit for nearly a century, the most notable among whom are Agnes Smedley, Ono Kazuko, Roxane Witke, Judith Stacy, and Margery Wolf. Their works constitute the classics of a flourishing field which now boasts a stellar cast of younger and innovative scholars. But the academic imperative of specialization has made the fruit of women's studies less and less accessible to the common reader. The Feminist Press, a non-profit educational and publishing organization, has long taken upon itself the mission of disseminating feminist scholarship to the general reading public. Not coincidentally, at the height of the post-war women's movement, it published Agnes Smedley's memorable Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution (1976), for which Florence Howe, founder and president of the Feminist Press, wrote an appreciative afterword.

Readers of Holding Up Half the Sky will not be surprised to learn that Howe was also the chief impetus behind this anthology. Modeled on an earlier anthology on Japanese women, Holding Up Half the Sky offers...