Xia Shi. At Home in the World

In At Home in the World: Women and Charity in Late Qing and Early Republican China, Xia Shi focuses on a group of women who were married and had no professional careers or modern education. Shi adopts a special perspective to examine how this group of women repositioned themselves through participating in charitable and philanthropic activities during the late Qing and Republican periods. Shi’s study provides a contrastive image of what we know about “new women,” and offers a piece of the puzzle that has been missed in the current studies of Chinese women’s gradual transformation from domesticity to the public realm from the turn of the century to the 1930s. The book is divided into three parts based on the chronology and the activities of philanthropists and charitable organizations. Shi begins the first two chapters by focusing on a small number of elite women who, in the gradually opening society in the late Qing period, expanded their activities to the public domain through engaging in campaigns of charity and philanthropy. Using the stories of two women—a Manchu woman, Guaerjia Huixing, and her suicide to promote girls’ education (chap. 1), and a rich widow, Ma Qingxia, who became involved in philanthropy and sponsoring revolutionaries (chap. 2)—Shi argues that in the progressive political atmosphere and with the surge of patriotism in the late Qing, the actions of such women not only opened the public domain for themselves but also had a strong impact on women’s participation in public affairs in general.

China · Elite · Patriotism · Political science · Politics · Public life · Realm · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies