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Abstract
The formation of a Chinese women's media public in the critical years of nation-building (1898–1937) was important in promoting, exhorting and debating women's interests. This media public enabled women writers to discursively construct new subjectivities, and mediate the relation between women's reality and representations, women and men, and feminism and other “-isms.” Women's journalism brought writing women's social concerns and social events involving women to public attention, and contributed to the formation of imagined communities and Chinese sisterhood among literate women. Women's journalistic discussions made gender issues important to the building of a modern nation-state, and gender equality and women's emancipation central to Chinese modernity. Women's press writings provided various writing women opportunities to wrestle with men for the discursive power over women's issues. My study argues, in 1898–1937, writing women had genuine and continuous feminist interests, which intervened with nationalism and other “-isms,” but was never identical with them.
Late Qing women writers appropriated nationalist discourses for feminist interests, and employed multiple sources—liberal discourse, “Good Wives and Wise Mothers” discourse, and reinvented Chinese tradition—to construct women's new subjectivities. The press writings of early Republican suffragists suggest women suffragists exercised their “citizenship” by resisting male partisans' dominance in the early Republican legislature and politics. They entered spaces dominated by men, reversed gender hierarchy, and challenged government authority. May Fourth writing women wanted to be human and women, and took the initiative to win men's alliance in fighting for their rights in marriage, coeducation and the public social contact. Women's press writings in 1925–31 show autonomous feminism replaced male feminism when women's actual experiences in the National Revolution surpassed male feminists' proposals. The diversity and complexity of Chinese feminism made it survive both the upsurge of nationalism before 1927 and the debacle after 1927. In 1932–37, women's media public not only formed critical voices to the state promotion of the New Life Movement, shaped public opinions on women-related social events, defended women's dignity, legal right and proper roles, but also created important social networks among writing women. Some women employed this media public to cultivate women's culture.
