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

the purpose of national strengthening. Male proposals that women should engage in republican revolution and devote themselves to industrial production around 1911 were to build a republic. May Fourth men advocated new women as equal citizens with civil rights to support their humanist ideas and advance their enlightened vision of modern China. Male partisans of the mid-1920s lobbied women to achieve emancipation through participating in the party-led National Revolution. Male intellectuals of the 1930s constructed Chinese women as defenders of traditional virtues, proper familial relationships, and social and political order.

Where can researchers have access to authentic feminist voices? Tani Barlow maintains that no written sources can provide unmediated access to the lives of Chinese women.³ If so, then Chinese women's public writings at least provide us mediated access to the lives of Chinese women. Women's periodicals in the first half of the twentieth century have left firsthand information on the feminist and political concerns of women journalists and are good sources to study their agency in constructing feminist discourse, proposing new subject positions, and acting on new feminist ideals. Those writings reveal their ways to advance the feminist cause through adapting nationalist discussions and accommodating the policies of parties and state. Numerous women's periodicals speak coherently to modern readers on how Chinese women journalists responded to the sociopolitical changes in the early decades of the twentieth century, perceived the relationship between women and the nation, and understood women's political, social, and civil rights as citizens of a modern nation. Women's media writing sheds light on the tension between male feminist discourse and the female one and reveals the differences between male-prescribed feminism and the reality of women's lives.

In Western countries, feminism is a political discourse advocated mainly by middle-class white women, aiming at equal rights and legal protection for women. Western feminists voice concern about gender differences, advocate equality for women, and campaign for women's rights and interests. Complicated by Western imperialism in China and Chinese women's reality, “women's rights” in China at the turn of the twentieth century had two meanings: one was the humanist understanding of