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The demands of revolutionary society, the social and ideological turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, and the rapid economic growth of the Dengist era have all had important and sometimes disturbing impacts on private and family life in China. For this study of daughter-mother relationships, Harriet Evans interviewed educated professional women born between the 1950s and the 1980s about their childhoods and in particular about the way they had been mothered. When her interviewees were themselves mothers she also discussed the way they were bringing up their own daughters. This methodology made it possible to highlight the way intimate family life, gendered expectations and the reproduction of the evolving gender order were affected over time by changes in the political climate and in social and cultural expectations.
Evans organizes her subjects' memories of growing up around a number of carefully chosen themes: separation, communication, discrimination and son preference, the boundaries of life inside and outside the home, the gendered body, and filiality. During the Maoist era, in the name...