A most remarkable change took place in the first half of the twentieth century in China--women journalists became powerful professionals who championed feminist interests, discussed national politics, and commented on current social events by editing independent periodicals. The rise of modern journalism in China provided literate women with a powerful institution that allowed them articulate women's presence in the public space. In editing women's periodicals, women writers transformed themselves from traditional literary women (cainü) to professional women journalists (nübaoren) in the period of 1898-1937 when journalism became increasingly independent of and resistant to state control. The women's media writings in the early decades of the twentieth century not only reveal the historical diversity and complexity of feminist issues in China but also casts light upon important feminist topics that have survived the Nationalist, Communist, and economic reform eras. Today, public debate on women's issues in Mainland China and Taiwan is shaped by past feminist discourse and uses a vocabulary and language familiar to readers of an earlier era. This book examines how women journalists constructed Chinese feminism and debated patriarchy and women's roles in the newly created public space of print media during the period of 1898-1937. It studies Chinese women's public writings in periodicals edited and staffed by women journalists in four major urban centers-Shanghai, Tokyo, Beijing, and Tianjin at a time when urban society underwent major transformation and experienced drastic political, social, and cultural changes. The revolution that overthrew the imperial government in 1911; an attack on patriarchy by cultural radicals in 1915-1919; and the advocacy of nationalism, liberalism, socialism, and feminism by intellectuals who received a Western-style education all worked together to undermine the Confucian notions of gender hierarchy, spatial separation of the sexes, and female domesticity among the well-educated urban classes. Doors of political participation, public activism, and production cracked open for courageous women who ventured into urban public spaces. From 1898 to 1937, urban women of the upper, middle, and working classes became increasingly visible at modern schools, as well as in career and production fields, political activism, and women's movements. At the same time, women edited independent periodicals and championed women's rights. Women's periodicals provided a site where writers negotiated with nationalism, patriarchy, and party lines to define and defend women's interests. These early feminist writings captured how activists perceived themselves and responded to the social and political changes around them. This book takes a historical approach in its examination and uses gender as an analytical category to study the significance of women's press writings in the years of nation building. Treating women journalists as agents of change and using their media writings as primary sources, this book explores what mattered to women writers at different historical junctures, as well as how they articulated values and meaning in a changing society and guided social changes in the direction they desired. It delineates the transformation of women journalists from political-minded Confucian gentry women to professional journalists, and of women's periodicals from representing women journalists' views to addressing the concerns and needs of the majority of women. It analyzes how the concepts of "feminism" and "nationalism" were embodied with different--even contesting--meanings at given historical junctures, and how women journalists managed to advance various feminist agendas by tapping on the various meanings of nationalism. This is an important book for collections in Asian studies, journalism history, and women's studies.

This book investigates sisterhood as a converging thread that wove female subjectivities and intersubjectivities into a larger narrative of Chinese modernity embedded in a newly conceived global context. It focuses on the period between the late Qing reform era around the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, which saw the emergence of new ways of depicting Chinese womanhood in various kinds of media. In a critical hermeneutic approach, Zhu combines an examination of an outside perspective (how narratives and images about sisterhood were mobilized to shape new identities and imaginations) with that of an inside perspective (how subjects saw themselves as embedded in or affected by the discourse and how they negotiated such experiences within texts or through writing). With its working definition of sisterhood covering biological as well as all kinds of symbolic and metaphysical connotations, this book exams the literary and cultural representations of this elastic notion with attention to, on the one hand, a supposedly collective identity shared by all modern Chinese female subjects and, on the other hand, the contesting modes of womanhood that were introduced through the juxtaposition of divergent “sisters.” Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together historical materials, literary and cultural analysis, and theoretical questions, Zhu conducts a careful examination of how new identities, subjectivities and sentiments were negotiated and mediated through the hermeneutic circuits around “sisterhood.”

Feminism, Women’s Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China focuses on a sensational elopement in the Yangzi Delta in the late 1920s to explore how middle- and lower-class members of society gained access to and appropriated otherwise alien and abstract enlightenment theories and idioms about love, marriage, and family. Via a network of communications that connected people of differing socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, non-elite women were empowered to display their new womanhood and thereby exercise their self-activating agency to mount resistance to China’s patriarchal system. Qiliang He’s text also investigates the proliferation of anti-feminist conservatisms in legal practice, scholarly discourses, media, and popular culture in the early Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). Utilizing a framework of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book traverses various fields such as legal history, women’s history, popular culture/media studies, and literary studies to explore urban discourse and communication in 1920s China.

By exploring the interplay among gender, religion, and modernity, this book exposes the part Chinese Christian women played in China’s quest for a strong nation in general and in Republican Beijing’s modern transformation in particular. Focusing on the Beijing Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the author examines how the Association, guided by the Christian tenet “to serve, not to be served,” tailored its Western models and devised new programs to meet the city’s demands. Its enterprises ranged from providing women- and child-oriented facilities to promoting constructive recreational activities and from reforming home and family to improving public health. Through an analysis of these endeavors, the author argues that the Chinese YW women's contribution to the city's modernity was a creative embodiment of the then socially targeted missionary movement known as the Social Gospel. In the process, they demonstrated their distinctive new ideals of womanhood featuring practicality, social service, and broad cooperation. These qualities set them apart from both traditional women and other brands of the New Woman. While criticized as trivial, their efforts, however, pioneered modern social service in China and complemented what municipal authorities and other progressive groups undertook to modernize the city.

If we place women at the center of our account of China’s last two centuries, how does this change our understanding of what happened? This deeply knowledgeable book illuminates the places where the Big History of recognizable events intersects with the daily lives of ordinary people, using gender as its analytic lens. Leading scholar Gail Hershatter asks how these events affected women in particular, and how women affected the course of these events. For instance, did women have a 1911 revolution? A socialist revolution? If so, what did those revolutions look like? Which women had them? Hershatter uses two key themes to frame her analysis. The first is the importance of women’s visible and invisible labor. The labor of women in domestic and public spaces shaped China’s move from empire to republic to socialist nation to rising capitalist power. The second is the symbolic work performed by gender itself. What women should do and be was a constant topic of debate during China’s transformation from empire to weak state to partially occupied territory to nascent socialist republic to reform-era powerhouse. What sorts of concerns did people express through the language of gender? How did that language work, and why was it so powerful? Drawing on decades of Hershatter’s groundbreaking scholarship and mastery of a range of literatures, this beautifully written book will be essential reading for all students of China’s modern history.

Focusing on Chinese elite women as a special socio-political group, this book places the sophisticated networks they formed in the shifting geographical, social, cultural and political spaces of wartime China, where their political engagement, knowledge-making, and network-building in support of 'national resistance and reconstruction' (kangzhan jianguo) unfolded. By examining the emergence, development, integration, and transformation of these networks as an unsettled, fragmented process - a process that lasted through the extended wars and upheavals in China from the 1930s to the 1950s and that moves beyond party ideologies and geopolitical borders, the book seeks to explore the dynamics of war, politics, and gender in the broader context of the Second World War.

In Engendering the Woman Question, Zhang Yun examines the early Chinese women’s periodical press as a mixed-gender public space to explore men’s and women’s gender-specific approaches to a series of prominent topics central to the Chinese “woman question.”