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

citizens as they adopted democratic institutional practices in their struggle for women's suffrage. Their writings brought gender issues into early republican politics, thus expanding the meaning and practice of politics. Suffragists defended women's rights and challenged the political dominance of men in their writing. Women writers of the May Fourth era (1915–1923) appropriated the rhetoric of emancipation advocated by New Culture figures to discuss women's suffrage, labor movements, and legal rights. This rhetoric enabled women writers to redefine gender norms and legitimize women's presence in schools, modern professions, and public spaces. In appropriating the rhetoric of human rights to advocate women's sharing of male power and privilege, women writers seriously explored how to be women in modern society. They demanded that the society meet women's reproductive needs during pregnancy and maternity and take care of women's household chores (such as child care and cooking) so that they could have public opportunities. By employing the law as rhetoric to advance women's rights and articulating a vision of new woman (xinnüxing) in the landscape of an emerging modern China, women journalists steered cultural and discursive changes towards the realization of feminist goals.

In its mature stage, reached in 1924–1937, women's print media manifested diverse feminist voices, and many feminist aspirations clashed with nationalist proposals. Such feminist defiance and resistance to state control demonstrates women journalists’ agency in defending women's freedom of speech and their growing professional ethic that journalism should represent the voice of the people. Such emerging professionalism enabled women journalists to overcome their ideological and feminist differences and respond to and cooperate with each other in their feminist writings and practices. Women writers struggled to keep alive earlier feminist concerns, negotiated the differences among women writers, and debated the gender policies of political parties and the state. Self-conscious feminist movements coexisted with the party-led women's emancipation movements during the National Revolution of 1924–1927. Female partisans used feminist issues as a rallying point for mobilizing various urban women to participate in the National Revolution.