Ah Bing and Her 'Sisters'
Since the "normalization" of Sino-American relations in 1979, most U.S. scholarship on China has focused on politics and economics. But historians have also learned much about how ordinary Chinese variously have coped with the rigors of everyday life. Here, journalist Alice Greenway describes the plight of rural women in Canton before World War II, and how one woman, Ah Bing, joined others, through a network of "sisterhoods," in vows of spinsterhood to escape forced marriage and poverty.