Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in

[helen]

Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco

The setting for this captivating history is San Francisco, which had the largest Chinese population in the United States. Yung, a second-generation Chinese American born and raised in San Francisco, uses an impressive range of sources to tell her story. Oral history interviews, previously unknown autobiographies, both English- and Chinese-language newspapers, government census records, and exceptional photographs from public archives and private collections combine to make this a richly human document as well as an illuminating treatise on race, gender, and class dynamics.
While presenting larger social trends Yung highlights the many individual experiences of Chinese American women, and her skill as an oral history interviewer gives this work an immediacy that is poignant and effective. Her analysis of intraethnic class rifts--a major gap in ethnic history--sheds important light on the difficulties that Chinese American women faced in their own communities. Yung provides a more accurate view of their lives than has existed before, revealing the many ways that these women--rather than being passive victims of oppression--were active agents in the making of their own history.

www.amazon.com/Unbound-Feet-History-Chinese-Francisco/dp/0520088670/ref=sip_rech_dp_4#reader_0520088670

[baksha]

Judy Yung is a presently at professor emeritus of United States History and holds a Masters of Librarianship from the University of California Berkeley, CA. She is recognized as the foremost historian on Chinese American in American with a specialty in Chinese American women.

[helen]

Good to see all of this great work being done - we really need to get on top of it, as our elders are passing before the information can be handed on.