Charlotte Furth

Charlotte Davis Furth (January 22, 1934 – June 19, 2022) was an American scholar of Chinese history. She was a professor at California State University, Long Beach, and at the University of Southern California. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright fellowship for her research, and published several books.

Early life and education Charlotte Davis was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the daughter of Lambert Davis and Isabella Davis. She earned a bachelor's degree in French literature from the University of North Carolina in 1954. She completed doctoral studies in Chinese history at Stanford University in 1965, the same year her younger child was born.

Career Furth taught history for 23 years at the California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), until 1989, and then for 18 more years at the University of Southern California (USC). In 1972 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She taught at Beijing University in 1981 and 1982, one of the first American Fulbright fellows admitted to teach in China after the Cultural Revolution. She retired with emeritus status from USC in 2008. and served on the editorial board of The Journal of Asian Studies. She was a contributor to The Cambridge History of China. Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium (1972, with Merle Goldman and Jerome B. Grieder) The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China (1976, edited by Furth) Women in China: Bibliography of Available English Language Materials (1984, with Lucie Cheng and Hon-ming Yip) "Blood, Body, and Gender: Medical Images of the Female Condition in China 1600–1850" (1986) "Concepts of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infancy in Ch'ing Dynasty China" (1987) "Androgynous Males and Deficient Females: Biology and Gender Boundaries in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century China" (1988) "Chinese Medicine and the Anthropology of Menstruation in Contemporary Taiwan" (1992, with Ch'en Shu-yueh) "Poetry and Women's Culture in Late Imperial China: Editor's Introduction" (1992) A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History 960-1665 (1999) Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History (2007, with Judith T. Zeitlin and Ping-chen Hsiung) Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century (2010, with Angela Ki Che Leung and Qizi Liang) Opening to China: A Memoir of Normalization, 1981–1982 (2017)

Personal life In 1956, Charlotte Davis married her childhood friend Montgomery Furth, a philosophy professor. They had two children, David and Isabella. Her husband died in 1991, and she died in 2022, at the age of 88.