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

flexibly adjusted their goals and approaches in different time periods. It demonstrates how in editing and writing for women's periodicals, female journalists changed the priorities of social and political relations by focusing on an array of issues particular to women's interests. They used experiences central to women's lives (foot binding, education, marriage, motherhood, family, career, franchise, property, and legal rights) to frame their discussions about patriarchy, society, power, and politics. In editing women's periodicals, women journalists developed self-conscious feminist identities which were often in conflict with the demands of patriarchy, political parties, the state, and nationalism. Women's media writings reveal the tension between female discourse and male discourse and the gap between male-proposed subject positions for women and women's relationship to those positions.

Women's Journals and the Public Sphere

Since Jurgen Habermas’ book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere—an Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society was translated into English in 1989, employing the concepts of “civil society” and “public sphere” to analyze the changing relationship between state and society in China has remained controversial among historians of China. The scholarly publications since the late 1980s investigating the formation of the public sphere in China generated intense debate in the journal Modern China in the early 1990s on whether concepts of “public sphere” and “civil society” could be applied to studying China.²⁸

In Western cultures, “civil society” is composed of the totality of voluntary civic and social organizations and institutions that form the basis of a functioning society, as opposed to the force-backed structures of a state and commercial institutions of the market. Civil society represents independent forms of social life from below and is free from state tutelage. Habermas treats the “public sphere” as a sphere between civil society and the state, in which the state authority is publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people. He defines the public sphere as a forum in which private people come