This pioneering work examines prostitution in Shanghai from the
late nineteenth century to the present. Drawn mostly from the
daughters and wives of the working poor and declasse elites,
prostitutes in Shanghai were near the bottom of class and gender
hierarchies. Yet they were central figures in Shanghai urban life,
entering the historical record whenever others wanted to
appreciate, castigate, count, regulate, cure, pathologize, warn
about, rescue, eliminate, or deploy them as a symbol in a larger
social panorama.
Over the past century, prostitution has been understood in many
ways: as a source of urbanized pleasures, a profession full of
unscrupulous and greedy schemers, a changing site of work for
women, a source of moral danger and physical disease, a marker of
national decay, and a sign of modernity. For the Communist
leadership of the 1950s, the elimination of prostitution symbolized
China's emergence as a strong, healthy, and modern nation. In the
past decade, as prostitution once again has become a recognized
feature of Chinese society, it has been incorporated into a larger
public discussion about what kind of modernity China should seek
and what kind of sex and gender arrangements should characterize
that modernity.
Prostitutes, like every other non-elite group, did not record their
own lives. How can sources generated by intense public argument
about the "larger" meanings of prostitution be read for clues to
those lives? Hershatter makes use of a broad range of materials:
guidebooks to the pleasure quarters, collections of anecdotes about
high-class courtesans, tabloid gossip columns, municipal
regulations prohibiting street soliciting, police interrogations
ofstreetwalkers and those accused of trafficking in women,
newspaper reports on court cases involving both courtesans and
streetwalkers, polemics by Chinese and foreign reformers, learned
articles by Chinese scholars commenting on the world history of
prostitution and analyzing its local causes, surveys by doctors and
social workers on sexually transmitted disease in various Shanghai
populations, relief agency records, fictionalized accounts of the
scams and sufferings of prostitutes, memoirs by former courtesan
house patrons, and interviews with former officials and
reformers.
Although a courtesan may never set pen to paper, we can infer a
great deal about her strategizing and working of the system through
the vast cautionary literature that tells her customers how not to
be defrauded by her. Newspaper accounts of the arrests and brief
court testimonies of Shanghai streetwalkers let us glimpse the way
that prostitutes positioned themselves to get the most they could
from the legal system. Without recourse to direct speech,
Hershatter argues, these women have nevertheless left an audible
trace. Central to this study is the investigation of how things are
known and later remembered, and how, later still, they are
simultaneously apprehended and reinvented by the historian.
General
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