Readings from Asia: The Story of a Pronoun

Huang Xingtao 黄兴涛, “Ta” zi de wenhua shi “她”字的文化史 [The Cultural History of the Chinese Character “ta” (the third person feminine pronoun)]. Fuzhou: Fujian Jiaoyu Chubanshe. 2009. In written Chinese, in contrast to English, the third-person feminine pronoun—the equivalent of “she”—was completely absent until the early twentieth century. In the late 1910s, when the voices of women’s liberation rang out in China, the Chinese character ta 她, for the third-person feminine singular pronoun, was invented. The invention and dissemination of the word ta not only reflected an ideological gendering of the Chinese script but also provoked heated academic and popular debates well into the 1930s. Thus, the history of ta provides a prism through which to explore modern Chinese history. Huang Xingtao’s “Ta”zi de wenhua shi is the first major work to survey the term’s creation.