Charlotte Furth

January 22, 1934 - June 19, 2022 Charlotte Furth, professor emerita of Chinese history at the University of Southern California, died on June 19, 2022, in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 88.
Charlotte was born January 22, 1934, in Charlottesville, Virginia, the eldest child of Isabella and Lambert Davis. She graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1954 with a B.A. in French literature. In 1956, she married Montgomery Furth; they were married for 35 years until his death in 1991. They had two children: David, born in 1957, and Isabella, born in 1965.
In graduate school at Stanford University, Charlotte switched from French to Chinese history and received a Ph.D. in History in 1965. She became a professor of history at California State University, Long Beach, where she taught from 1966 to 1989. In 1989, she joined the History Department at USC where she taught until her retirement in 2008.
Charlotte's career as a China scholar began during the height of the Cold War, when mainland China was off-limits to Americans. As China emerged from the Cultural Revolution and Chinese-American relations thawed in the 1970s, she was one of the first American academics to visit China, and in 1981–1982 she spent a year teaching at Beijing University as part of an international exchange of scholars and teachers. Her memoir of that year, Opening to China: A Memoir of Normalization, 1981–1982, written over 30 years later, is a unique eyewitness account of an almost forgotten inflection point between China's Maoist past and its transition to a global superpower.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Charlotte became a preeminent expert on the history of Chinese medicine, with particular focus on issues of kinship, gender, and sexuality. Her pioneering study of medical archives and other untapped source materials culminated in the 1999 publication of A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History 960–1665. Her work remains foundational for the generation of China scholars that succeeded her, many of whom she encouraged and mentored.
Charlotte remained intellectually active in retirement, claiming "freedom to dabble" and pursuing interests ranging from Proust and Pushkin to the 19th century international market in Chinese art that was the source of Chinese paintings bought by her grandparents and passed down as family heirlooms.
Charlotte was as devoted to her family as she was to her academic pursuits. She is survived by her two children, David (Martha) and Isabella (Everett), and four grandchildren (Andrew, Emma, Emery, and Robert), as well as her siblings Martha King (Basil) and Minor Davis (Denise) and many nieces, nephews, and cousins, all of whom she loved dearly. We will be hard-pressed to match her brilliance and intellectual curiosity, but she continues to inspire us to try.