ABSTRACT
China is considered one of the four great ancient civilizations of the world, together with ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India. It arguably has the longest continuous history of any country in the world, with more than 3,500 years of written history and its roots dating back more than 5,000. In the past 40 years, since its birth, the field of women and gender in Chinese history has experienced several stages of development. Beginning from the early 1990s, in response to Joan Wallach Scott's call to add gender as one of the analytic categories for historical study,2 China scholars, especially female historians, began to move beyond the “women as victim” narrative. Careful readers might also contemplate how the availability of certain types of sources influence the way people conduct our research and the topics people pick, explore what other sources people hope to find, and in what ways they enrich our understanding of the subject.
