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

preserve women's voices rather than initiate change in women's lives. Women journalists, however, were concerned about nationalist and feminist issues and wrote for public consumption. They intended their writings to initiate social and political changes and often challenged existing gender norms and the status quo. Their writings advocated women's rights, circulated new feminist ideals, and mobilized women for party and feminist activism.

Over the period of 1898–1937, Chinese women from different backgrounds had edited journals with the professed goal of promoting women's rights. The profiles of women journalists changed over time as the political atmosphere, social background, and cultural milieu in China constantly changed. The earliest women journalists around the 1898 reform were gentry women who received a Confucian female education and were married to gentry officials who championed constitutional reform in China. Attracted by men's proposals of anti–foot binding, female education, “good wives and wise mothers” (liangqi xianmu), “mothers of the nation” (guominmu), and women as producers, gentry women supportive to reform ventured into the press world to discuss gender equality in education and at home and to advocate women's political participation. Those elite women journalists wrote in classical Chinese. Besides writing polemic essays, they also appropriated traditional feminine genres—guitishi (boudoir poetry) to express their political consciousness and lienüzhuan (women's biographies) to introduce Western political and social heroines.¹

From 1903 to 1913, Chinese women who received an education in Japan became leading women journalists. Many of them were from gentry households and were versed in Chinese classics prior to their journey to Japan. They went to Japan either as relatives of male political exiles and students or as students themselves. Those women edited many Chinese women's periodicals in Tokyo and Shanghai, discussing women's education, career, and marriage, preaching anti-Manchu revolution and republican ideas, and advocating “female nationalists” (nüguomin) and women revolutionaries. Although those women writers were good at classical Chinese, they explored vernacular language (baihua), regional