Ellen Widmer has been a Center Associate at the Fairbank Center since 1981 and a driving force behind the Center’s Gender Studies Workshop since 1999. This year’s workshop, The Beauty and the Book: Women, Knowledge, Literature, and Book Culture in Late Imperial China and Beyond—co-sponsored by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, Wellesley College, the Harvard University Asia Center, and the Fairbank Center—will take place on Friday, April 25. In June, Professor Widmer will retire from her position as Mayling Soong Professor of Chinese Studies & Professor of East Asian Studies at Wellesley College. Below she shares her memories of the Fairbank Center and thoughts on her career.
What are some of your earliest memories of the Fairbank Center?
My association with the Fairbank Center goes back decades. It began in the 1960s with my days as a graduate student wife, when Professor Fairbank was in charge. At first, I had no intention of going into the China field, but a year spent in Taiwan while my then husband did his graduate work kindled my interest, and I had found my life’s calling. At last, I had something to talk about at the Fairbanks’ Thursday teas.
My earliest recollection of anything resembling a Center situates it on the north side of Cambridge Street, in Coolidge Hall—the former Ambassador Hotel. A clearer impression is of the dining room, in which the storied Mrs. Black served hot lunches to the various Centers. I can still picture the long, rectangular table, at which Merle Goldman, Paul Cohen, Dwight Perkins, Benjamin Schwartz, and others held forth in regular, China-focused conversations. This memory is reinforced by my own tenure as a graduate student, which began in 1972.
And how did you get into your focus on literature and gender?
Having settled on China as the focus of my graduate work, I needed to find a field. I had majored in political science as an undergraduate at Wellesley College. Immediately upon graduation I attended the Fletcher School at Tufts (along with Steve Goldstein). I might have gone on in the area of politics, but once I moved to Harvard, I was drawn to the kind of archival work that Professor Patrick Hanan was conducting, before his career as a translator began. I ended up with a degree in Chinese literature and a specialty in fiction of the Ming and Qing. During my first several years of teaching—in the 1980s, at Wesleyan University—my courses were mainly on fiction, modern as well as traditional, whereas my research focused on the traditional side.
It was when I was invited to join a panel on gender dynamics at AAS, sponsored by Professor Allan Barr at Pomona College, that my attention turned to gender studies. Charlotte Furth of California State University, Long Beach, was the editor of Late Imperial China at the time, and through working with her on an article, I began to turn out research in the gender field.
Another source of inspiration was Professor Susan Mann of UC Davis, who actively encouraged this new interest. The conference “Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State” of 1992, sponsored in part by the Fairbank Center, was an additional milestone. The Gender Studies Workshop was a direct outgrowth of that conference, and it was through early leaders like the late Professor Christina Gilmartin (Northeastern), Weili Ye (UMass Boston), and Paul Ropp (Clark University) that I was subsequently drawn into the planning process.
You have been such a crucial contributor to the Fairbank Center’s Gender Studies Workshop over the years. How did the workshop evolve?
Gender studies was taking on new importance throughout the humanities, and Fairbank Center directors like Professors Ezra F. Vogel, Roderick MacFarquhar, Wilt Idema, Elizabeth J. Perry, and Mark C. Elliott sustained the workshop with support of various kinds. What had begun as a series of about 6-8 late afternoon talks per year gradually evolved into a single, day-long seminar, which is its current form. I was much more involved with the workshop before it switched to its day-long format, under the direction of Professors Wai-yee Li (Harvard), Eileen Chow (Duke), Man Xu (Tufts), and Catherine Yeh (Boston University). Nowadays, topics like gender and law, gender and performance, and gender and friendship are pursued in a more focused way than was possible under the old arrangement. Meanwhile, the Fairbank Center moved twice, first to Central Square and then to its current location on the south side of Cambridge Street. With these changes, new forms and formats for discussion emerged.
Having a gender studies workshop at all was something of a departure from the initial Fairbank Center mission, which (as I saw it) had more to do with institutional history, politics, economics., and missionary affairs. Yet the China field has turned out to be a very fruitful area for gender studies, not only in contemporary fields but also harking back to the Ming, Qing, and earlier. As far as the Ming and Qing are concerned, one of the most valuable assets is the large cache of writings by women of that period held in Chinese and other libraries. Thanks to the Ming-Qing Women’s Digitization Project—which was initially launched by Grace Fong (McGill University)—a good (and growing) number of these materials are available online.
Tell us about your enormously successful career at Wellesley College.
My career at Wesleyan led, in due course, to a return to Wellesley College, this time as a professor, in 2007. The invitation to return had mostly to do with administrative matters, but the gender-focused side of my interests was boosted by this move. I have now been at Wellesley for almost twenty years, and my courses—“Traditional Chinese Theater,” “The Dream of the Red Chamber,” “The Fall of the Ming,” and “Women and Revolution in China”—blend gender with literary, historical, and political concerns.
What are your post-retirement plans?
I retire in June of this year. It’s a daunting prospect, but I look forward to more time for research. I have two projects underway at the moment. One combines gender with a longstanding interest in missionary studies, which has been nurtured by Professor Perry, but which also harks back to Professor Fairbank. It focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and tracks three paths of evolution: within China, as the “teachers of the inner chambers” (to use Dorothy Ko’s formulation) took on musical instruction; internationally, as protestant missionaries sought to introduce western music in the form of hymns; and in America, with several early Boxer Indemnity students who majored in music. The other draws on my interest in the history of the book. It begins with some newly discovered materials and moves on from there to consider the lingering attachments of women to their natal families, often long into their married years. I owe a great debt to Mr. Xiaohe Ma of the Harvard-Yenching library, who helps me dig up materials from around the world.
In addition, the expanse of free time that will come with retirement allows me to anticipate a return to conversations at the Fairbank Center, not only on gender but on a wide range of themes. My research will surely benefit from greater exposure than at present to the work of others in my own and related fields.