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

women's natural rights and socioeconomic opportunities, and the other was the nationalist understanding of women's political participation in building a modern Chinese nation. The two meanings of “women's rights” predetermined that from its very beginning, Chinese feminism had an intimate relationship with nationalism.

In the second wave of the feminist movement in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, historians with the drive to understand gender hierarchy and women's experiences elsewhere started paying attention to Chinese women's history in the 1970s. Early feminist historians were influenced by the dominant paradigm of writing the national history of their time, and they situated Chinese women in the formation of a modern nation, explored the connections between women and political movements, women and nationalism, and women and socialism in China. They found that feminism in China served either the nationalist or Socialist movements, and denied the existence of an autonomous feminism. Roxane Heater Witke broke ground by studying women revolutionaries at the end of the Qing and explored the transformation of attitudes towards women during the May Fourth era.⁴ Charlotte Beahan studied women revolutionaries and suffragists in the early republic and argued that the Chinese feminist movement “was indissolubly linked with, yet subordinate to and defined by the interests of the nation.”⁵ Alison Drucker noticed that male political reformers in China and Christian missionaries shared a representation of Chinese women as benighted and oppressed; their difference was that the former argued that nationalistic reform could save Chinese women, while the latter proposed Christianity as the solution.⁶ Socialist-feminist scholars Delia Davin and Elisabeth Croll explored the relationship between feminism and socialism in China and found that since the creation of the CCP, women's feminist interests (gender equality and women's emancipation) were often in conflict with the political needs of the Communist Party (class struggle, mass production, Socialist revolution) at different time periods and were often subordinate to the political priorities of the party and Socialist state.⁷

In the early 1980s, critical feminist historians who studied modern Chinese women's history explored the complex ways Chinese women