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

Meanwhile, women students struggled to defend female education, and women reformers strove for women's legal rights. Feminist concerns predated and postdated the party-led women's emancipation movement, and most women's periodicals survived the ideological polarization of the late 1920s as female writers turned to education, social reforms, and legislative proposals in promoting women's interests.

Female journalists in the 1930s criticized the growing irrelevance of the traditional ideology in contemporary social and economic conditions. They negotiated and dealt with the state-centered and reactionary policy towards women and turned women's journals into a forum to defend women's public lives. They challenged state-prescribed gender norms by criticizing corrupt politics, prejudiced society, limited legal reforms, and male chauvinism. Disregarding the state's slogan of “good wives and wise mothers,” feminist writers adapted state ideology, directed media discussions, combated social prejudices, and defended women's rights and interests. Their analysis shed light on the nature, significance, and lessons that those events held for women. Their writing defended women's dignity and proposed new gender relations and role models for women. Despite their differences in political leanings, class backgrounds, feminist agendas, and religious affiliations, women journalists cultivated journalistic networks.

As a whole, this book argues that Chinese women journalists constructed the rich meanings of feminism and participated in the vibrant women's movements by editing and writing for women's journals. They negotiated with male prescriptions, nationalist discourses, and party directives and constructed new gender subject positions to enable Chinese women to break down the spatial separation of sexes, step out of domestic sphere, and play active roles in political, economic, social, and cultural fields in the public spaces. Feminist writings awoke women readers to the idea of gender equality and women's obligations to the nation and empowered them to initiate political, social, and cultural changes that could actualize gender equality and women's emancipation.