The Precious Raft of History

This book reveals and interprets the rich diversity of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Chinese approaches to their own past and the modern West through the lens of the woman question. Writers and activists who engaged in debates over this question variously appropriated biographies of womena genre with a 2,000-year history in China and a new political salience in the early twentieth century. Judge maps the ways these individuals used historical Chinese and modern Western women's biographies to promote competing visions of female virtue, talent, and heroism, and, ultimately, to advance competing evaluations of China's ritual teachings, cultural heritage, and national future. She concludes by applying the hermeneutics of historical change she develops for the turn of the twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first century, as women's issues continue to foreground Chinese conceptions of the past, the West, and the nation.

Joan Judge is Associate Professor in the History Department and the Humanities Division at York University. She is also the author of Print and Politics: `Shibao' and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford, 1996) and co-editor of Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women's Biography in Chinese History (2010).