| Chapter : | Introduction |
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national history and party-led women's movements into the history of Chinese women. The women's movement in China was composed of women activists who had diverse political and cultural affiliations, such as liberal feminists, Christian women, women suffragists, and female reformers. Partisans of either the Nationalist Party (GMD) or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were only part of the story. Besides, different women journalists collaborated and contributed to each other's campaigns based on their common interests and political needs, and feminist agendas could cut across party and class loyalties and build alliances among women writers. Second, the book explores the changes and continuity of feminist issues as manifested in women's periodicals. Third, the book investigates the significance that feminist voices held for Chinese women at large. I have often found resonance and encouragement in the writings of Chinese women journalists across time and space.
Who Were the Women Journalists?
The political press became a new medium for the male elite to propose national strengthening and envision new modes of polities since the late Qing. When male intellectuals, envisioning the new nation, disseminated knowledge about it in their journals of opinion, women's involvement in the press revised some basic categories through which scholars understood Chinese social relations, institutions, and cultural productions. In editing women's periodicals, female journalists remade themselves by articulating their public presence, attacking patriarchy, proposing new gender relations, and advocating democracy for women.
Women journalists differed from traditional literary women in significant ways because they assumed public identity as modern professionals. Traditional literary women used their literary gifts to serve the interests of the family and did not intentionally write for a public audience. They could craft a creative space for themselves in their domestic lives but did not challenge the prevailing Confucian gender system that gave them meaning, solace, and dignity. Their writings and publications were to