This book brings together much of Wen-hsin Yeh's earlier research with new material on the late Qing and the World War II period to provide a fascinating and engagingly presented depiction of lower-middle-class life and attitudes in early twentieth-century Shanghai. Since the 1980s, historians have responded to Shanghai's rapid development by moving on from studies of the city's wealthy bourgeoisie and its increasingly politically conscious factory workers to a new focus on the daily life of the middle classes. Yeh, who has been at the forefront of these studies, focuses here on office and shop workers, those we might think of by one clothing metaphor as holding “white-collar” jobs but whom Yeh terms the “gowned.” She describes their everyday lives, their aspirations for modern lifestyles, but above all their developing political self-consciousness against the backdrop of political disintegration and foreign invasion.
The book begins with a study of the changing...
