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

period from 1898 to 1937. Such alterations often reflected the changes in nationalist rhetoric, state policies, cultural trends, economic conditions, and the power relations between the state and society.

This book treats Chinese women's published writings in 1898–1937 as three continuous but distinctive stages. In the initial stage, from 1898 to 1911, writing concentrated on discussing the relations between women and the nation. Women writers appropriated the nationalist discourse on women, employed nationalist vocabulary to construct new subject positions for women and propose feminist aspirations, and articulated a rationale for women's privacy, self-reliance, and self-respect. They selectively reinvented Chinese women's tradition (Hua Mulan, Qing Liangyu), critically adapted Western liberal feminist ideas (natural rights, equality between men and women), and proposed the ideal of nüguomin (female nationalist) for Chinese women. Although male print media had prescribed particular types of women as their envisaged readers and formulated a new femininity of “good wives and wise mothers” before women were recognized as actual readers, women journalists did not simply follow such normative standards. Women's print media became a terrain different from that envisaged and constructed for them. Women writers debated and disagreed with male writers. Such discursive differences led to the formation of autonomous feminism and women's movements. The “women-nation” did not override other feminist issues, and feminist aspirations were crucial in developing women's subjectivities.

In the formative stage, from 1911 to 1923, the dramatic political and social changes in China reshaped the relationship between the individual and the nation. Women's media writings were influenced by the liberal idea of inalienable individual rights. In the early 1910s, women's journals were often edited by women's societies with specific political agendas. Instead of representing the voices of the majority of women or serving the needs of the reading public, women journalists informed the reading public with their feminist and political concerns, and the standard of objectivity of journalism was irrelevant to their practices. Women writers employed a rhetoric that emphasized the civil rights of