Gail Hershatter, “The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past” (University of California Press, 2011)

Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast · May 23, 2012 · 1h 14m

When I teach my course on gender, sexuality, and human rights, my students invariably want to talk about China’s one-child policy. They imagine living in a state where the government tells you how many children you can have – and they’re horrified.

One thing I learned from reading Gail Hershatter‘s new book, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (University of California Press, 2011), was that rural women of a generation earlier would have loved to have the state take charge of their fertility. The state was already controlling so much – like how many bushels of grain…