ABSTRACT
Much has been written about the Confucian rhetoric of gender difference and hierarchy, but little about its treatment of childhood socialization and experiences. In China there were few recorded experiences of childhood, much less of girlhood, until the publication throughout the twentieth century of a number of female life stories, mostly written during the early decades of this century. Narrated during times of rapid and radical social change and by unusual women, mostly literate and advantaged, they document a dawning recognition that not only were there gender-differentiated norms and behavioural expectations, but female lives were to be substantially and increasingly different from those of brothers or other males of family or neighbourhood. Reflecting this burgeoning consciousness, these women reconstructed narratives around a precise selection of remembered moments which gendered their experiences and memories of childhood and documented the journey from girlhood to womanhood. Indeed the terms ‘daughter’, ‘journey’, and ‘memory’ frequently appear in the titles and subtitles of their life stories. 1 What is particularly interesting about these narratives, which are written and published in disparate places and times, is that the female narrators quite independently have recalled so many of the same moments, commonly identifying them as pivotal to their experience of girlhood. The gendered moments inscribed in their memories can be grouped into three clusters. There were those moments uniquely female en route to ‘becoming a woman’ and still compulsory in pre-revolutionary twentieth-century China; moments common to both male and female childhood but gender specific in their consequences, separating female from male experiences of childhood; and moments which were memorable for females precisely because they had crossed gender categories.
