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

women's journalism, feminist discourse, and feminist practices been adequately investigated. Jacqueline Nivard, Wang Zheng, Nicole Huang, and I have studied specific women's journals.²⁶ Charlotte Beahan, Elisabeth Croll, Hu Ying, Joan Judge, Qian Nanxiu, and Paul Bailey have explored women's journals of a specific period to study feminism and nationalism, feminism and socialism, and women and modernity.²⁷

As the first English work to systematically study Chinese women's media writings over the entire period of 1898–1937, this book continues to explore important issues raised by previous feminist historians of China—the relationship between feminism and nationalism, the patriarchal oppression and gender hierarchy within the nationalist discourse, women's agency in carving out their own space while making accommodations with state gender policy, and the discourse of femininity and its criticism. This book traces the vibrant women's movements and the diverse feminism in China in the first half of the twentieth century by investigating women journalists’ different political proposals and feminist agendas. Although historically, both GMD and CCP women advocated women's movements along their party lines, various feminist groups and individuals outside both parties played active and important roles in advocating gender equality, women's rights, and emancipation. Liberal feminists advocated gender equality, women's independence, and social rights. Suffragists struggled for women's place in the political arena and for women's formal political power. Christian women proposed monogamy, motherhood, household management, and better working conditions for women workers. The writings and feminist practices of women journalists unaffiliated with political parties were an irreducible part of Chinese women's history.

This book investigates the connections between female writings, feminism, and women's agency. It pays close attention to the interaction of feminist ideas and women's public activism at a time when different societal forces contended with each other and the state for the ultimate power to define women's issues, family, morality, political order, and the meaning of masculinity and femininity. It analyzes the changing meanings of “nationalism” and “feminism” and how women journalists