1999 12 at the symposium on women's theory in China held to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the All-China Women's Federation, the author was invited to make a paper entitled "Women's History: What Can and Should Be Done for Women in China". Ten years later, my focus shifted: "female/gender history" replaced "female history" and "for women" became "for society". This paper discusses how the change of scholars' research orientation is influenced by academic trends and changes of the times.
Trends in international women's history research;
From female history to gender history
The second feminist movement in Europe and America from 65438 to 0960 triggered an upsurge in women's history. After returning to campus from the forefront of the feminist movement, female historians began to explore the root of oppression from history and found that their female ancestors were "lost" and "silent" in history, so female scholars began to try to fill the gap in women's history and began to study women's history as the research object. At that time, women's history was centered on women's writing about women, writing for women and writing with women. Its theoretical weapon and core concept is "patriarchy", which is aimed at the oppression of women as a whole by male groups. Jeddah Lerner's Creation of Patriarchy comprehensively discusses the process and reasons for the establishment of this system in Europe, while her other book Most Discoveries is her past claim that women's history can be "discovered" and serve women.
In 1980s, the concept of "gender" was widely used in historical research. In the article Gender: An Effective Category of Historical Analysis, Scott pointed out that gender is one of many social relations based on gender differences, and it is an interactive system in meaning, norms, organizational mechanism and discipline construction. Gender is also a basic way to express and maintain power relations. This means that in order to improve the situation of women, we must change the social system and cultural structure. This analysis is much more comprehensive and profound than the patriarchal clan system in which men control women in the family and capitalist market.
In 1990s, gender history once became the mainstream of writing. Scholars have found that the writing of gender history makes it possible for "women" who were originally at the center of women's history research to be diluted and marginalized by "gender-neutral discourse". That's true. Some people think that since it is a "gender history", men and women should be equally divided, ignoring that women are still in a marginal and weak position compared with men in history and reality. Therefore, some scholars, on the one hand, write "women/gender history" to correct the deviation, on the other hand, they propose to rewrite the general history with gender. At the end of 1990s, some scholars proposed to "transcend gender", pay attention to the differences and mobility of women's identities, break the single and fixed gender perspective and gender analysis methods, cross-analyze more categories, factors and identities related to women to highlight the differences among women, and put women and gender power in different time and space positions for "situational" research.
The Transformation of Women's History Research in China
At the beginning of the last century, there was also an upsurge in the study of women's history in China, which was closely related to the modern demands of intellectuals who were concerned about the fate of the country and the nation at that time. Some male scholars pay attention to "female issues" from social history, legal history, political history and other disciplines. They may cry for the tragic situation of women, advocate women's liberation, or study the idea of abolishing prostitution and releasing prostitutes, and so on. Chen Dongyuan's Life History of Women in China has been influencing women's writing in today's history since it laid the narrative framework of women's oppression-liberation, but the framework of oppression-liberation has been replaced by the "status analysis" of historical materialism.
Since 1980s, the study of women's history has been active for a time, but it has little influence in the field of traditional historiography. Although women scholars, historians and women's federations all dabbled in women's history, they began to introduce gender for "localization" in the mid-1990s, returned to China to study local women and gender history, and conducted a series of basic research, but single spark can start a prairie fire was still ready to start a prairie fire.
In China, researchers of women's history are divided into "Troika", with different research characteristics: historians focus on argumentation, women's historians focus on innovation of theoretical methods, and women's federations rely on organizational energy to promote them. In the past 20 years, the research fields have also been expanding, such as national history, birth history, education history, etc., with women as the main research object. Theoretically, historians still judge by "status" and avoid "power"; Feminist historians, on the other hand, have a special liking for gender analysis, and have made a breakthrough in clarifying the theory of local patriarchy, especially the research on China's gender system has been recognized by female scholars in different disciplines.
Subjectivity of researchers:
Promote the functional transformation of women/gender history
In China, feminist historiography emphasizes the application and practicability of women's history, starting from "for women" or "writing about women", or from "for women" to analyzing the structure and power of social system, so as to fundamentally eliminate gender inequality. The difference between the names of "female history" and "gender history" is only different stages in the research process, and there is no absolute division that the former is aimed at women and the latter is aimed at society.
10 years ago, the author talked about what women's history can and should do for women in China. Today, the author puts forward what contribution women/gender history can make to society, which embodies the consistency of feminist historiography mission and function. The question raised ten years ago seems to be only aimed at "for women". In fact, the so-called "female problem" can not be solved without men, who have been working hard for it since the Reform and Reform Movement and the May 4th Movement. At present, it is closely related to the gender inequality in the political, economic and cultural structure of men and women. For example, a series of questions ten years ago: Why do rural areas have to have sons? Why is there a domestic violence? Why are women always in the minority in politics? ..... Ten years later, these problems have not been solved. Taking the problem of having sons in rural areas as an example, it has evolved into a serious imbalance in the sex ratio at birth. The official data has been hovering around 120 for the last three years, which has caused a major hidden danger to population security. The direct reason is the preference for boys over girls, and further questioning is the construction of the gender system and cultural customs that have long favored boys over girls and the lack of effective intervention measures. When we use the research results of the patriarchal gender system of Han nationality to analyze the two "male fertility complexes" of farmers' carrying on the family line and raising children to prevent old age, we find that the paternal system, paternal surname system and paternal residence system of family system are passed down from generation to generation with the help of established cultural habits, and they are used to it. In addition, the gender blind spots in national policies and informal institutions at the grass-roots level have contributed to the preference for sons over daughters, forming a strange circle of confusion and difficulties in bearing and supporting the elderly, resulting in a serious imbalance in the sex ratio at birth.
Of course, the knowledge and theoretical contribution of women/gender history is only one aspect of the whole work, and what is more important is interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary cooperation. As a researcher of women's history, it is right to pursue the academic frontier, concentrate on reading, do solid research, constantly innovate knowledge and ask new questions. However, we should see that society needs scholars to establish social care and humanistic spirit, consciously turn academic achievements into "public knowledge" and carry out popular education.
(Author: Research Center for Gender and Social Development of Tianjin Normal University)
Article source: China Social Sciences News