Bringing together the work of distinguished China historians, anthropologists, and literary and film scholars, Gender in Motion raises provocative questions about the diversity of gender practices during the late imperial society and the persistence and transformation of older gender ideologies under the conditions of modernity in China. While several studies have investigated gender or labor in late imperial and twentieth century China, this book brings these two concepts together, asking how these two categories interacted and produced new social practices and theories. Individual chapters examine agricultural and urban work, travel within China, overseas study, polyandry, the acting profession, courtesan culture, female politicians, Maoist work culture, and the boundaries of virtue and respectability.

Edited by Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson

Introduction: Axes of Gender: Divisions of Labor and Spatial Separation
Part I: Patterns of Mobility
Chapter 1: Making Sex Work: Polyandry as a Survival Strategy in Qing Dynasty China
Chapter 2: The Virtue of Travel for Women in the Late Empire
Chapter 3: Gender on Stage: Actresses in an Actors' World (1895-1930)
Chapter 4: Women on the Move: Women's Kinship, Residence, and Networks in Rural Shandong
Part II: Spatial Transformations
Chapter 5: Between Nei and Wai: Chinese Women Students in Japan in the Early Twentieth Century
Chapter 6: Playing with the Public: Late Qing Courtesans and Their Opera Singer Lovers
Chapter 7: Unofficial History and Gender Boundary Crossing in the Early Chinese Republic: Shen Peizhen and Xiaofengxian
Chapter 8: Gender and Maoist Urban Reorganization
Chapter 9: He Yi's The Postman: The Workspace of a New Age Maoist
Part III: Boundaries
Chapter 10: Women's Work and the Economics of Respectability
Chapter 11: The Vocational Woman and the Elusiveness of "Personhood" in Early Republican China
Chapter 12: Women's Work and Boundary Transgression in Wang Dulu's Popular Novels
Chapter 13: Virtue at Work: Rural Shaanxi Women Remember the 1950s