[1] Inspired by sinologist Knight Biggerstaff at Cornell, Rawski decided to pursue historical studies in graduate school, and earned a Ph.D. in History and Far Eastern languages at Harvard University in 1968 under Yang Lien-sheng.
Paul A. Cohen judged that Rawski "turns this entire set of assumptions on its head...." Arguing that traditional village schools were accessible, texts cheap, and teachers low salaried, and defining functional literacy as the ability to read everyday texts rather a mastery of the classics, she concluded that male literacy rates in late imperial China were in fact among the highest in the pre-modern world, probably amounting to almost one literate person per family.
Cohen commented that her analysis was "not unassailable" but that her "overall thesis" "puts the problem of literacy and popular education... in a wholly new light, and future research in this area will have to take up where she has left off.
"[5] In the early 1990s, Rawski joined a group of scholars who began study of the Manchu language and found new views opened by the materials they now could read.
Of her monograph, The Last Emperors, Jane Kate Leonard, writing in China Review International wrote "is a remarkable work of historical synthesis and descriptive analysis of the intimate social world of the Qing dynasty’s ruling elite".