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

What brought literary women to the field of print media? What did writing for public consumption mean for women writers? How did women journalists edit their independent periodicals, accommodate their own feminist differences, and interact with readers? How did they negotiate with the state, political parties, and male-dominated mainstream media in defining women's needs, roles, and social position? How did they introduce feminist ideas, report women-involved events, handle controversial gender issues, and circulate news on women's lives? Did women journalists’ social background, public identity, and editorial concerns change over time? If the press is an agent of change, how did women writers initiate social changes in the direction they desired? What kind of public space did women's print media provide?

This book takes a historical approach to these questions 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 and how they articulated values and meaning in a changing society and guided social changes in the direction they desired. It situates gender issues in the context of nation building and examines how women's public writings challenged the male dominance of print media, competed for the authority and authenticity of feminist discourse, constructed new feminine positions and gender norms, and integrated gender equality and women's emancipation into Chinese modernity. This book 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.

Three issues will be central to this book. First, the book intends to integrate women's discourses and activities which did not fit into the