This work examines prostitution in Shanghai from the late-19th 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. Since the late-19th century, prostitution has been understood in many ways: as a source of urbanized pleasures; as a profession full of unscrupulous and greedy schemers; as a changing site of work for women; as a source of moral danger and physical disease; as a marker of national decay; and as a sign of modernity.
For the Communist leadership of the 1950s, the elimination of prostitition symbolized China's emergence as a strong, healthy and modern nation; since the 1980s, as prostitution once again has become a recognized feature of Chinese society, it has been incorporated into a larger public decision about what kind of modernity China should seek and what kind of sex and gender arrangements should characterize that modernity. Prostitutes did not record their lives, so the book makes use of a broad range of materials to look for clues to their lives.
Materials used include guidebooks to the pleasure quarters, collections of anecdotes about high-class courtesans, tabloid gossip columns, municipal regulations prohibiting street soliciting, police interrogations of streetwalkers and those accused of trafficking in women, newspaper reports on court cases involving both courtesans and streetwalkers, polemics by Chinese for 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 of sufferings of prostitutes, memoirs by former courtesan house patrons, and interviews with former officials and reformers.
Author Biography:
Gail Hershatter is Professor of History and Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Workers of Tianjin, 1900-1949 (1986), coauthor of Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s (1988), and co-editor of Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State (1994).
