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

together as a public and debate rationally the affairs of their own governance. He locates these fledgling “publics” born out of a reading public in eighteenth-century France and England and links the formation of the public sphere with the rise of capitalism and a continuing bourgeois revolution. Such bourgeois public spheres came into being together with the rise of novels and literacy, political journalism, and the spread of reading societies, theaters, salons, and coffee houses and expanded at the same time when the depersonalized state underwent its rapid modern growth under the banner of absolutism. Once individuals gathered as reading groups or enthusiasts of theatre, the arts, and politics, they melded into a public capable of debating and challenging the validity and legitimacy of governments. The purpose of this public sphere is to eliminate the domination of authoritative power and establish a government that is representative of the public will and responsive to public opinion. Habermas argues that from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the rise of party politics, the proliferating press, and the expansion of universal suffrage limited political debate to parliamentary circles, and the public no longer participated directly in the formation of the rules.²⁹

Feminist scholars criticized Habermas’ theory on the public sphere for excluding women from the story. The “individual,” “civil society,” and “the public” discussed by Habermas have been constituted as patriarchal categories in opposition to womanly nature and the “private” sphere. Although Habermas acknowledges the presence of women in the public sphere as readers, he excludes women from the public sphere where political debates were involved.³⁰ Joan B. Landes has studied the historical transformation from French absolutism to bourgeois society and argues that the shift in the organization of public life is linked to a radical transformation of the system of cultural representation—the exclusion of women from the bourgeois public was central to its incarnation. She proposes that feminist theory and practice supply important “vantage points from which to re-view the modern public's emergence” per place in the public sphere.³¹

Like western Europe, China after 1500 experienced an intensive growth in the volume of long-distance trade and the rise of large-scale