Published in 2014
224 pages
Leta Hong Fincher is a journalist and scholar who has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Dissent Magazine, Ms. Magazine, BBC, and CNN. She is the recipient of the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi award for her reporting on China. Named by the Telegraph as an “awesome woman to follow” on social media, she lives in New York. Betraying Big Brother named one of the best books of 2018 by Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Foreign Policy Interrupted, Bitch Media and Autostraddle. In 2020, New York Public Library named Betraying Big Brother one of its “essential reads on feminism”.
What is this book about?
After China’s Communist revolution of 1949, Chairman Mao famously proclaimed that “women hold up half the sky.” In the early years of the People’s Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations with expansive initiatives such as assigning urban women jobs in the planned economy. Yet those gains are now being eroded in China’s post-socialist era. Contrary to many claims made in the mainstream media, women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of many rights and gains relative to men. Leftover Women debunks the popular myth that women have fared well as a result of post-socialist China’s economic reforms and breakneck growth.
