Harriet Evans' new book explores how the transformation of gender practices and representations over the past half century have shaped Chinese women’s lives and self-identifications. Evans studies the intimate aspects of their lives as daughters and mothers in their respective experiences of separation, communication, domestic and public worlds, difference and male privilege, the body and filiality. The author treats mothers and daughters as constructs within specific historical and discursive contexts. Her subjects are two cohorts of Beijing-based academic and professional women from different social and family backgrounds — those who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s and those who grew up in the economic reform era. Evans argues that gender difference and discrimination were constructed and performed in diverse forms across time and that Chinese women both sustained and contested gender discrimination in understanding themselves as gendered subjects.