Choosing Revolution

Some two thousand women participated in the Long March, but their experience of this seminal event in the history of Communist China is rarely represented. In "Choosing Revolution", Helen Praeger Young presents the oral histories of twenty-two women veterans of the Red Army's legendary six-thousand-mile "retreat to victory" before the advancing Nationalist Army. In addition to their riveting stories of the march itself, Young's subjects reveal much about what it meant to grow up female and, in many cases, poor in China during the first decades of the twentieth century.