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

socially constructed code of conduct. Gender fluidity challenges the rigidly defined dichotomy of “male vs. female” and proposes freedom to choose any kind of gender with no defined boundaries.

Feminist historians since the mid-1990s have paid more attention to how the historical, social, and cultural changes in China affected the construction of femininity and altered people's perceptions of proper gender relationships. They write against the “May Fourth paradigm,” which invented the idea that Chinese tradition was feudal, patriarchal, and oppressive; identified Chinese women with backwardness, dependency, and victimization; and made Chinese women's lives changeless and ahistorical. Dorothy Ko and Susan Mann have studied poetry produced by gentry women in southern China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exploring proper gender norms, women's everyday practices, and their self-perceptions. They find that publishing, commercialization, urbanization, and state regulation in late imperial China revised the ideal of womanhood and the proper women's sphere; gentry women enjoyed informal power within their households without overtly challenging the Confucian gender hierarchy. In fulfilling their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers, literary women carved a space through writing to cultivate their familial, social, and public relationships.¹⁷

Using gender as an analytical category to study Chinese women in the modern era enables feminist historians to discover Chinese women's agency in initiating social changes. Instead of treating prostitution in Shanghai as a symbol of national shame or plague, Gail Hershatter's book treats it as a modern institution. She empowers prostitutes as modern women living public lives who challenged the proper gender norms and spatial separation of sexes. They not only participated in political and social changes but also constructed new social roles and gender relationships.¹⁸ Wang Zheng has studied middle-class career women who grew up in the May Fourth era and lived as successful professionals in Shanghai before the Communist era. She demonstrates how new women actively deployed and appropriated Chinese women's legacy and ideologies from the West and embraced feminism as a new way of life in their pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation. Wang Zheng noted