View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarBank@NUS NEGOTIATING THE IMAGE OF A NEW WOMAN: WOMEN INTELLECTUALS’ GROUP IDENTITY AND THE FUNU ZHOUKAN (WOMEN’S WEEKLY) IN THE 1930S CHINA JIANG NA (B.A. IN HISTORY, BEIJING UNIVERSITY) A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2005 II Acknowledgements The completion of this thesis would have been impossible without the guidance of my MA supervisor Professor Huang Jianli, and Dr. Thomas D. Dubois: my great gratitude to both of you for guiding me through the whole process of selecting the topic, collecting research materials and the final stage of writing. The Department of History and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences have also given me enormous support in my research in the National University of Singapore, without which my field trip to China would have been much more difficult. Special thanks go to Ms. Teo Hwee Ping, Harminder Kaur, Ong Zhen Mini, Manjit Kaur and Beatriz P. Lorente, who kindly read through my draft and gave valuable advice on my writing. I feel lucky to be a member of a cheerful postgraduate student community in the History department, and I will always remember the great time I spent with my wonderful classmates. I also owe Prof. Ian L. Gordon, Prof. Brian Farrell, Ms. Kelly Lau, Ms. Normah Osman, and Mrs. Letha Umar from the Department of History, for their kind help and guidance through my postgraduate study in Singapore. Finally I thank my parents, to whom this thesis is dedicated to, for their most great love and support especially towards my pursuing of higher degree. III Table of Contents Introduction-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1 Chapter 1 the Development of Discourses on New Women from the May Fourth Era to the 1930s China-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------12 1. Male feminism in China from the late Qing to the 1930s------------------------12 2. Female feminism from the late Qing to the 1930s--------------------------------27 Chapter 2: Women Intellectuals as “New Virtuous Wives and Good Mothers”: A New Woman’s Image in the Women’s Weekly -------------------------------------------------------35 1. Defining the new task for women’s movement of the 1930s--------------------36 2. The “New Virtuous Wife and Good Mother” as against the “modern girl”---39 3. Knowledge and virtues for new Chinese women---------------------------------41 4. Salvation of less-advantaged women-----------------------------------------------54 5. Conclusion-----------------------------------------------------------------------------58 Chapter 3 Women Intellectuals as Social Critics: Petitioning to the Society and the State - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------59 1. Social critics on gender relations----------------------------------------------------59 2. Expectation on a government initiated women’s movement--------------------63 3. GMD’s attitudes towards women’s movement------------------------------------77 Chapter 4 Women Intellectuals as the New Women in Shaping a Modern Chinese Nation ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------86 1. International outlook and nationalist concerns: women intellectuals’ talents and virtue demonstrated---------------------------------------------------------------------------------87 IV 2. Assimilation to advanced western women-----------------------------------------97 3. Building a modern Chinese nation: social critics on the Chinese society and the government-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------108 4. Conclusion-----------------------------------------------------------------------------118 Conclusion-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------120 Bibliography---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------128 V Summary This thesis is a case study of discourses on the New Woman in the newspaper Women’s Weekly in 1930s China. Chapter 1 summarizes scholarship on the discourses of new women from the late Qing to the 1930s. It argues that discourses of male intellectuals’ on building a new woman regarded Chinese women as objects of reformation who needed to be transformed in order to strengthen the Chinese nation. The motive behind the discourses was rather the male intellectuals’ own desires for strengthening the nation, for individual liberty and for binding a nation under its own authority. Women intellectuals competed with their male counterparts to dominate feminist discourses as soon as they emerged on the stage. They advocated women’s autonomy towards women-concerned issues, which legitimized themselves to be the leader of women’s movement. The 1930s inherited their legacy and the contributors in the Women’s Weekly discussion carried forward the topics on gender equality and continued to regard women intellectuals as the leading force for the Chinese women’s movement, and ultimately, the new Chinese women. Chapter 2 examined how educated women were qualified in the Women’s Weekly to be the new women in contrast to the Shanghai style “modern girls” and the “less advantaged” women, due to the women intellectuals’ ability to define a perceived appropriate new Chinese woman’s model and to direct the women’s movement. Chapter 3 revealed how the contributors of the Women’s Weekly exercised their roles as social critics. They commented on social conventions that discriminate against VI women; more importantly, they acted as spokespeople of the Chinese women in petitioning for the state’s support of women’s welfare; inspired by the Soviet Union’s government model, they expected the future Chinese women’s movement to be under the GMD’s umbrella, even though such advocates could not go beyond pure lip service given the Nanjing government’s reluctance to support the women’s movement. Chapter 4 argues that the depiction on foreign women’s lives in the Women’s Weekly reiterated the contributors’ domestic concerns. They demonstrated their cosmopolitan outlook and nationalist concerns in evaluating Chinese women’s conditions within the international background. Both qualities are desirable according to the new Chinese women’s model they advocated. More directly, the contributors categorized foreign women as advanced and less advanced according to the “new virtuous wife and good mother” criteria and assimilated themselves to their foreign counterparts, which again assured the validity of the “new virtuous wife and good mother” model and women intellectuals’ identity as the new Chinese women. 1 Negotiating the Image of a New Woman: Women Intellectuals’ Group Identity and the Funü Zhoukan (Women’s Weekly) in 1930s China Introduction The image of the New Woman dominated gender discourses in early twentieth century China. As renewed women were the metaphors of a strengthened nation, elite social groups of Chinese society always competed in the construction of images of model women, through which they claimed themselves to be the leaders of an emergent and progressive Chinese society.1 This thesis is a case study of journalistic discourses on the image of the “new woman” in Funü Zhoukan (from hence Women’s Weekly), the supplement of the Nationalist Party (or Guomindang, GMD)’s official newspaper Zhongyang Ribao (Central Daily News) from 1935 to 1937. I argue that the construction of the New Woman image in the 1930s reflected the group identity of women intellectuals in the post May Fourth era. These intellectuals saw themselves as models for the new Chinese women and saviors of unenlightened women, as social reformers who represented women’s interests that were an integral part of a modern country. Women’s Weekly defined itself as post-May Fourth, i.e., to put the May Fourth principles into practice. It aimed at promoting an alternative modernity from Shanghai commercialism. The discussion involved the wide participation of the urban-middle to lower middle-class people, which included school teachers, civil servants and clerks. This study will present the vibrant discussions of women’s issues carried out in the 1930s, and 1 Liu Renpeng’s work on late Qing reformers’ promotion of women’s rights, and Wang Zheng’s analysis on May Fourth male intellectuals’ advocacy of feminism all argued the presence of each group’s own political agenda in which defining new Chinese women became necessary. Please refer to my detailed discussions on the development of feminist discourses from late Qing to the 1930s China in chapter one. detailed discussions. 2 argue for the presence of an intellectual identity: that of the new Chinese woman among educated middle-class Chinese women in the Chinese press. Previous scholarship on new woman’s image in China Previous scholarship has already spent much effort deconstructing the Chinese discourse of a “New Woman” in the late Qing, May Fourth and Communist China eras.2 Such discourses include the late Qing reformers’ opinions on women’s education and on anti-foot-binding, the May Fourth male intellectuals’ discussions of Nora (the heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House) and of the 1930s Nationalist and Communist parties’ advocacy of revolutionary women. Each group advocated a certain image of new Chinese women for their own interest.