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

were caught up in relations of power. Phyllis Andors, Judith Stacey, and Kay Ann Johnson analyzed the changes in women's lives in Socialist China and found that although the Socialist revolution had improved women's social and economic lives, it had not addressed the full range of gender inequalities—patriarchal oppression and gender hierarchy were preserved in the production field and family structure in the Socialist era. Scholars paid attention to the conflict between women's interests and the policies of the Socialist state, analyzed women's double burden at work and at home, and argued that Chinese women's liberation had been postponed in order to give priority to the immediate political needs of the party and the state.⁸ Because of the inaccessibility of primary sources, those major works drew on the CCP's policy and official documents for their interpretations of Chinese women's past. As a result, women could not appear as agents for social change. These works also neglected women's spontaneous movements and feminist struggles independent of the party leadership as well as other aspects of women's lives which did not fit into the political agenda of socialism.

From late 1980s to the mid-1990s, feminist scholars provided more diversified pictures of feminist movements and feminist discourse in China. Though they did not totally reject the paradigm of national history, they found that Chinese feminism was more diversified and that not all feminists sought nationalist/Socialist solutions for women's problems. They challenged the hegemony of nationalist and Socialist feminism by studying the tension between Chinese feminism and nationalism/socialism and the divisions and differences of feminists in China.⁹ Peter Zarrow and Ono Kazuko found that anarchofeminists in early twentieth-century China severed feminism from nationalism, prioritized the centrality of women's liberation in any true revolution, and proclaimed women's liberation not for the sake of the nation but out of moral necessity.¹⁰ Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter studied the changes in Chinese women's personal lives in the 1980s when the Socialist state shifted its focus from class struggles to economic reform. They found an awakened femininity among Chinese women as manifested in their adornment and fashion and their changing conceptions of love, marriage, and family lives. Besides