Honig, Emily.  Sisters and Strangers:  Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949.

Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1986.

 

The genesis of Emily Honig’s Sisters and Strangers was inspiration from E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, and an opportunity to join a group of Chinese researchers interviewing women who had been factory workers in pre-revolutionary China.  Honig’s approach, though, came to differ from both Thompson and the research group she worked through, as she says herself, when the stories told by the interview subjects made it clear that their experiences were diverse, and not always consistent either with the search for a women’s revolutionary proletariat or the analysis of Thompson.  The complexity and diversity among women cotton mill workers in Shanghai that Honig reflects the diversity of lived experience that seems to be the subject of many articles and monographs on Republican China at this time, including differences between women based on their native place, on the factory in which they worked (and the culture/nation of the its owners), and even on the position of each woman within the factory.  Honig’s introduction makes her point that women workers were a large part of the factory workforce in Republican Shanghai, which makes their participation in a theoretical revolutionary proletariat a critical part of any historical cause investigation of the revolution.  However, she says, they don’t fit such a class-based view so simply.  The remainder of her book is dedicated to showing the working lives of these women in as much detail as possible.  Honig’s bibliography is extensive, but she relies primarily on interviews conducted by herself and others among surviving women in Shanghai.  While she does an excellent job with the sources themselves, she pays only scant attention to the problems of history and memory in her introduction, and presents the evidence she has in the other chapters as a kind of clear window onto the world of these workers.  In all this book is a fast and interesting read, though it presents some theoretical problems.