What have we learned during the past four decades about women and China's revolutions? How has that knowledge changed our understanding of recent Chinese history? This talk takes stock of how our historical narrative has changed. Then it asks about stubborn silences in the historical record, and how we might visualize gender with fuller awareness of our own blind spots.

Gail Hershatter is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a former President of the Association for Asian Studies.  Her works include The Workers of Tianjin (1986, Chinese translation 2016), Personal Voices: China Women in the 1980s (1988, with Emily Honig), Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (1997, Chinese translation 2003), Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century (2004), The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (2011; Chinese translation 2017) andWomen and China’s Revolutions (2019).