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

emphasizing the importance of economic power, women's freedom, and individuality in the 1980s, they also found that the All China Women's Federation and its local branches started speaking for women instead of for the CCP.¹¹

Christina Kelley Gilmartin studied early Communist women's political activities in the mass movement in the 1920s, challenging the model that the CCP mobilized women for emancipation. She found early female Communists created their own space, culture, and lives within the party by asserting a female perspective on a number of issues and criticizing expressions of male power.¹² Cheng Weikun's dissertation paid attention to the regional difference of Chinese women activists in early twentieth century and found that women activists in northern urban centers were more interested in social reform than their southern counterparts, who were interested in the anti-Manchu nationalist movement.¹³ Feminist literary critics analyzed the complicated relationship between male representation of modern women in literature and Chinese feminism. In 1988 Ching-Kiu Stephen Chan raised the observation that May Fourth male writers defined their male identity in relation to the female “other” in their works.¹⁴ Rey Chow argued in 1991 that the “new woman” in literature amounted to a new agency “that is constitutive of modernity in a non-Western, but Westernized context.”¹⁵ Tani Barlow argued in 1994 that the nature of “new woman” constructed in the May Fourth feminist discourse bears the masculine features of Western humanism.¹⁶

Gender has become a relevant category in Chinese history since the mid-1990s and has provided new ways through which family, state, and other social arrangements are articulated and justified. Gender is the result of socially constructed ideas about the behaviors, actions, and roles a particular sex performs. By analyzing the gender perceptions, roles, and identities and paying attention to aspects of gender relations that were emphasized and those that were left out, feminist historians could reread and reanalyze Chinese women's past experiences by focusing on the relations of subordination and domination. Gender can have ambiguity and fluidity. Gender ambiguity deals with one's freedom to choose, manipulate, and create a personal niche within any defined,