A major illustrated collection offering a fresh interdisciplinary reading of Chinese women's periodicals and history in the long twentieth century.

In Engendering the Woman Question, Zhang Yun examines the early Chinese women’s periodical press as a mixed-gender public space to explore men’s and women’s gender-specific approaches to a series of prominent topics central to the Chinese “woman question.”

Offering an entirely new approach to understanding China’s journalism history, this book covers the Chinese periodical press in the first half of the twentieth century. By focusing on five cases, either occurring in or in relation to the year 1917, this book emphasizes the protean nature of the newspaper and seeks to challenge a press historiography which suggests modern Chinese newspapers were produced and consumed with clear agendas of popularizing enlightenment, modernist, and revolutionary concepts. Instead, this book contends that such a historiography, which is premised on the classification of newspapers along the lines of their functions, overlooks the opaqueness of the Chinese press in the early twentieth century. Analyzing modern Chinese history through the lens of the newspaper, this book presents an interdisciplinary and international approach to studying mass communications. As such, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese history, journalism, and Asian Studies more generally.

This indispensable guide for students of both Chinese and women’s history synthesizes recent research on women in twentieth-century China. Written by a leading historian of China, it surveys more than 650 scholarly works, discussing Chinese women in the context of marriage, family, sexuality, labor, and national modernity. In the process, Hershatter offers keen analytic insights and judgments about the works themselves and the evolution of related academic fields. The result is both a practical bibliographic tool and a thoughtful reflection on how we approach the past.

What can we learn about modern Chinese history by reading a marginalized set of materials from a widely neglected period? In Republican Lens, Joan Judge retrieves and revalorizes the vital brand of commercial culture that arose in the period surrounding China’s 1911 Revolution. Dismissed by high-minded ideologues of the late 1910s and largely overlooked in subsequent scholarship, this commercial culture has only recently begun to be rehabilitated in mainland China. Judge uses one of its most striking, innovative—and continually mischaracterized—products, the journal Funü shibao (The women’s eastern times), as a lens onto the early years of China’s first Republic. Redeeming both the value of the medium and the significance of the era, she demonstrates the extent to which the commercial press channeled and helped constitute key epistemic and gender trends in China’s revolutionary twentieth century. The book develops a cross-genre and inter-media method for reading the periodical press and gaining access to the complexities of the past. Drawing on the full materiality of the medium, Judge reads cover art, photographs, advertisements, and poetry, editorials, essays, and readers’ columns in conjunction with and against one another, as well as in their broader print, historical and global contexts. This yields insights into fundamental tensions that governed both the journal and the early Republic. It also highlights processes central to the arc of twentieth-century knowledge culture and social change: the valorization and scientization of the notion of "experience," the public actualization of "Republican Ladies," and the amalgamation of "Chinese medicine" and scientific biomedicine. It further revives the journal’s editors, authors, medical experts, artists, and, most notably, its little known female contributors. Republican Lens captures the ingenuity of a journal that captures the chaotic potentialities within China’s early Republic and its global twentieth century.

Paul J. Bailey provides the first analytical study in English of Chinese women's experiences during China's turbulent twentieth century. Incorporating the very latest specialized research, and drawing upon Chinese cinema and autobiographical memoirs, this fascinating narrative account: - Explores the impact of political, social and cultural change on women's lives, and how Chinese women responded to such developments - Charts the evolution of gender discourses during this period - Illuminates both change and continuity in gender discourse and practice Approachable and authoritative, this is an essential overview for students, teachers and scholars of gender history, and anyone with an interest in modern Chinese history.

A most remarkable change took place in the first half of the twentieth century in China--women journalists became powerful professionals who championed feminist interests, discussed national politics, and commented on current social events by editing independent periodicals. The rise of modern journalism in China provided literate women with a powerful institution that allowed them articulate women's presence in the public space. In editing women's periodicals, women writers transformed themselves from traditional literary women (cainü) to professional women journalists (nübaoren) in the period of 1898-1937 when journalism became increasingly independent of and resistant to state control. The women's media writings in the early decades of the twentieth century not only reveal the historical diversity and complexity of feminist issues in China but also casts light upon important feminist topics that have survived the Nationalist, Communist, and economic reform eras. Today, public debate on women's issues in Mainland China and Taiwan is shaped by past feminist discourse and uses a vocabulary and language familiar to readers of an earlier era. This book examines how women journalists constructed Chinese feminism and debated patriarchy and women's roles in the newly created public space of print media during the period of 1898-1937. It studies Chinese women's public writings in periodicals edited and staffed by women journalists in four major urban centers-Shanghai, Tokyo, Beijing, and Tianjin at a time when urban society underwent major transformation and experienced drastic political, social, and cultural changes. The revolution that overthrew the imperial government in 1911; an attack on patriarchy by cultural radicals in 1915-1919; and the advocacy of nationalism, liberalism, socialism, and feminism by intellectuals who received a Western-style education all worked together to undermine the Confucian notions of gender hierarchy, spatial separation of the sexes, and female domesticity among the well-educated urban classes. Doors of political participation, public activism, and production cracked open for courageous women who ventured into urban public spaces. From 1898 to 1937, urban women of the upper, middle, and working classes became increasingly visible at modern schools, as well as in career and production fields, political activism, and women's movements. At the same time, women edited independent periodicals and championed women's rights. Women's periodicals provided a site where writers negotiated with nationalism, patriarchy, and party lines to define and defend women's interests. These early feminist writings captured how activists perceived themselves and responded to the social and political changes around them. This book takes a historical approach in its examination and uses gender as an analytical category to study the significance of women's press writings in the years of nation building. Treating women journalists as agents of change and using their media writings as primary sources, this book explores what mattered to women writers at different historical junctures, as well as how they articulated values and meaning in a changing society and guided social changes in the direction they desired. It delineates the transformation of women journalists from political-minded Confucian gentry women to professional journalists, and of women's periodicals from representing women journalists' views to addressing the concerns and needs of the majority of women. It analyzes how the concepts of "feminism" and "nationalism" were embodied with different--even contesting--meanings at given historical junctures, and how women journalists managed to advance various feminist agendas by tapping on the various meanings of nationalism. This is an important book for collections in Asian studies, journalism history, and women's studies.

In 1872 in the treaty port of Shanghai, British merchant Ernest Major founded one of the longest-lived and most successful of modern Chinese-language newspapers, the Shenbao. His publication quickly became a leading newspaper in China and won praise as a "department store of news," a "forum for intellectual discussion and moral challenge," and an "independent mouthpiece of the public voice." Located in the International Settlement of Shanghai, it was free of government regulation. Paradoxically, in a country where the government monopolized the public sphere, it became one of the world's most independent newspapers. As a private venture, the Shenbao was free of the ideologies that constrained missionary papers published in China during the nineteenth century. But it also lacked the subsidies that allowed these papers to survive without a large readership. As a purely commercial venture, the foreign-managed Shenbao depended on the acceptance of educated Chinese, who would write for it, read it, and buy it. This book sets out to analyze how the managers of the Shenbao made their alien product acceptable to Chinese readers and how foreign-style newspapers became alternative modes of communication acknowledged as a powerful part of the Chinese public sphere within a few years. In short, it describes how the foreign Shenbao became a "newspaper for China."

This book develops a new approach to historical change at the turn of the twentieth century, a crucial stage in the unfolding of Chinese modernity. Its focus is on the fraught and momentous woman question, which foregrounded the cultural paradoxes and political aspirations that define the era. Judge probes Chinese approaches to their own past and the modern West (mediated via Japan) through a close examination of the varied cultural and political uses of female biography--a genre with a 2,000-year history in China and a new political salience in the early twentieth century.