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

Han chauvinism, anti-imperialist Marxism, anti-Communist radicalism, national salvation, national building, and national defense. Feminism in China also incorporated the notion of women's equal rights and opportunities and women's political participation. Those scholars argue that the flexible meanings of nationalism were useful for Chinese feminists because they could invoke multiple different qualities within the broad category of nationalism to suit their feminist cause. Edwards particularly mentioned that the emergence of two political parties in the mid-1920s began controlling the meaning of the term “nationalism,” thus restricting the ability of feminists to make feminist assertions through nationalist rhetoric.

The development of women's journalism in China was contemporaneous with the emergence of feminist discourse and women's movements. The interaction between feminist discourse and women's social and political practices was intriguing. Since both the CCP and the GMD wrote the history of Chinese women's movements along their own party lines, the political differences and feminist diversity of women journalists were left out. Women's periodicals preserve important sources on women activists whose stories have been forgotten in mainland China and Taiwan. Women's media writings help us to see how women journalists reinvented Chinese women's tradition, borrowed light from Western and Japanese women, and appropriated nationalist discussions to propose women's rights and gender equality in modern China. Women journalists not only constructed a feminist discourse to empower Chinese women but also proposed new subject positions which extended Chinese women's lives beyond the domestic sphere into social and political involvement. Once women activists assumed such discursive positions to enter the public sphere and challenge patriarchy, their social experiences challenged women journalists’ feminist expectations and pushed them to revise their feminist proposals or raise new feminist aspirations.

Despite the multiple advantages of using Chinese women's periodicals to study feminism and women's movements, so far, there is no single article or book that investigates Chinese women's print media in the period of 1898–1937 as a whole, nor has the relationship between