Volume 41, Number 16 · October 6, 1994
The Bottom of the Well
By Jonathan Mirsky
Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism
edited by Tani E. Barlow
Duke University Press, 307 pp., $17.95 (paper)
Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State
edited by Christine K. Gilmartin, edited by Gail Hershatter, edited by Lisa Rofel, edited by Tyrene White
Harvard University Press, 454 pp., $22.95 (paper)
Do Chinese women, as the Communist Party has held for decades, 'hold up half the sky?' Or, like the frog at the bottom of a well in a famous Daoist legend, do they see only a little blue patch? Why is it that tens of millions of them are said to be 'missing'? (Because from birth onward they die at a faster rate than men.) One of the contributors to the collections under review, Dai Qing, a writer much admired by Western women who study China, quotes a revolutionary song that would appeal to many foreign feminists: ' The dry black well is thousands of feet deep and women are at its bottom.'
Review, 5340 words
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