Women Journalists and Feminism in China, 1898–1937 By Yuxin Ma

open public discourse made the Chinese public sphere less theoretically defined.³⁷

Many scholars notice that from the end of the Qing to republican China, the law provided legal protection of individual rights, topics of political importance were openly discussed in the print media, and the nature of the state and its relations with societal forces underwent major changes. This could have generated a lively media public if there had been an effective constitution to limit the coercive and intrusive republican government. The growing scholarship on visible urban spaces such as parks, streets, teahouses, wine shops, and the court in China suggests that most scholars take the side of Rowe and Rankin. Most recently, some scholars have shifted their foci to those less obvious public spheres—for example, the literary public and the public of emotion, sentiment, and sympathy. Lee Haiyan studies literary sentimentalism in modern China and finds that “sentiment” (qing) helps form modern subjectivities. Her 2006 book offers a critical genealogy of the idea of “love” in modern Chinese literary and cultural history.³⁸ Eugenia Lean's 2007 book explores the political authority of public sympathy and female passion in the 1930s and analyzes the rise of public sympathy in early twentieth-century China. Her book sheds new light on the political significance of emotions and the powerful influence of sensational media, modern law in China, and the gendered nature of modernity.³⁹

Chinese women's periodicals provide researchers an opportunity to explore the intersection between gender and public spheres. This book offers insight into how, through writing for public consumption, women journalists found their way to the public sphere. Women's journals formed a literary and political public in which women writers circulated news of women's world, discussed women's social issues, proposed feminist aspirations, and constructed new subject positions to broaden women's public lives. Women's print media provided a site for women writers to mediate relations that constituted the social fabric and state institutions; to negotiate with men, society, parties, and the state; and to reconcile feminist ideals with women's reality. Women's periodicals demonstrated women writers’ self-conscious cultural activities in history