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

National Revolution.” Women's journals became a site where women partisans competed with liberal feminists, Christian women, and women reformers in defining feminist issues and priorities.

The crushing of the CCP in the Nanjing decade (1927–1937) led to ideological polarization of women's journals. Women journalists in the 1930s were a diverse group from the upper and middle classes—GMD women, CCP women, Christian women, women reformers, liberal feminists, and women students. More universities established journalism departments in the 1920s and 1930s, and academic journals and theoretical books made journalism a more specialized and professionalized field. Women journalists with professional training brought professional standards (objectivity, representing people's voices, and so on) into women's journals—they showed greater concern about women's social issues, interviewed distinguished career women, investigated women-related controversies, and mediated with different opinions. As arbiters of public affairs and defenders of women's interests, women journalists from different backgrounds formed professional alliances in nationalist and feminist movements. They criticized state policies, social prejudices, male chauvinism, and legal inconsistencies.

Women Journalists and Feminism in China

The main drawback of using sources produced by men and political parties to study women's history and feminism is that such sources did not speak for women's self-conscious concerns and feminist priorities, nor did the feminine positions prescribed by men and political parties for women match women's real lives. In the history of how political parties mobilized women in political movements, women were not protagonists. In male discourse on women's issues, women did not emerge as agents of change. Male reformers and revolutionaries at the end of the Qing and male intellectuals of the May Fourth era wrote on women's issues intensively in the print media, but their writings largely served nationalist agendas of different time periods. Male discussions of anti–foot binding, female education, and “good wives and wise mothers” at the end of the Qing were for