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Podcast: New Books in Women's History
Episode: Shu Yang, "Untamed Shrews: Negotiating New Womanhood in Modern China" (Cornell UP, 2023)
Description: If you are familiar with traditional Chinese literature, you have likely come across the figure of the âshrew,â a morally threatening woman who is either transgressive and polluting, promiscuous, or violent (or perhaps a combination of all three). Scholars of literature typically write about how this archetype faded out after 1911, while the figure of the more âmodernâ ânew womanâ came to dominate. In Untamed Shrews: Negotiating New Womanhood in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2023), Shu Yang shows how the shrew persisted and actually served as the basis for the celebrated ânew woman,â thus revealing an entirely different relationship between the shrew and the ne...