Reflecting on love and sexual discourses and becoming knowledge contributors: Chinese women’s critical reading on The Ladies’ Journal

ABSTRACT

With the growth of women’s periodicals in China during the early twentieth century, women started to assume an unprecedentedly conspicuous role in print culture as both readers and essay writers. Targeting well-educated young women of the new era, the leading women’s periodical, The Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi 婦女雜誌), can function as the precious prism to examine the critical reading practice of young urban women of the time. This paper investigates how women’s critical reading reflections on heterosexual love and gender relations that were manifested in the journal facilitated the formation of female subjectivity through women readers’ engagement with new gender norms and knowledge. It argues that the introduction and promulgation of literary works and feminist ideologies concerning women’s individuality embodied male editors’ concern on women’s empowerment, while also serving as their normative configurations of new knowledge surrounding womanhood and social progress. But women were not deprived of subjectivity when encountering these prescriptive knowledge. The public reading of texts that inspired young educated women to reflect on love and marriage displayed female readers’ feminist consciousness, conceptualizing women’s agency in providing alternatives for male intellectuals’ vision and contributing to the construction of public knowledge through their own discursive efforts.

KEYWORDS:

• Female subjectivity
• knowledge construction
• women’s periodical
• female readers

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Laikwan Pang, Prof. Xuenan Cao, Prof. Elmo Gonzaga, and Prof. Shoan Yin Cheung, for their insightful suggestions on the article. I am also grateful for the valuable comments provided by two anonymous reviewers and the kind support received from the editors of The Journal of Gender Studies. All the flaws of the article are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For detailed accounts on the background of the emergence of modern women’s education in early twentieth century China and relevant debates on it, please see Paul J. Bailey, Gender and Education in China: Gender discourses and women’s schooling in the early twentieth century (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 1–33.

2. From 1898 to 1911, the number of women’s journals published was relatively small, with only forty having been printed. However, by 1918, this number had grown significantly, with an additional 30 journals having been added. By the late 1930s, the number of women’s journals had grown exponentially, with over 250 journals having been published. See Yun Zhang, Engendering the Woman Question: Men, Women, and Writing in China’s Early Periodical Press (Brill, 2020): pp. 2–3.

3. For more detailed information about the introduction and circulation of Strindberg’s works in Republican China, see Yang Huali, and Zou Xiao, ‘Commentary on the Translation of Strindberg in the Period of the Republic of China 斯特林堡在民國時期的譯介述評,’ Journal of Mianyang Teachers’ College 綿陽師範學院學報, Vol. 37, No. 12 (2018): 104–110.

4. An article entitled ‘Strindberg and Women’ published on the sixth issue of Fiction Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao 小說月報) in 1927 concludes that ‘他一生所作的四十幾篇戲劇，差不多是描寫性慾的爭鬥，兩性的不安，與憎惡女性的。(The forty or so plays he (Strindberg) wrote in his lifetime are almost exclusively about the struggle of sexual desire, the uneasiness of the sexes, and the hatred of women.)’ Other intellectuals who introduced Strindberg such as Zhou Zuoren also used the word ‘Misogyniste’ to describe him, although not everyone who regarded him as a ‘misogynist’ held an entirely critical view of him.

5. For a more comprehensive analysis on how the advocacy of women’s emancipation out of the request to attack Confucian values and institutions by the ‘New Culturalists’, which facilitated the initial stage of feminist movement in China, see Wang, 1–32.

6. Zhang Chuntian has elaborated on how the discourse of women’s emancipation was forcibly associated with Enlightenment discourses during the May Fourth period, bearing their reflections on how Chinese society should be reformed or ‘how China should be modernized’ during the transitional period. See Zhang Chuntian, Female Liberation and Modern Imagination: ‘Nora’ from the Perspective of Intellectual History 女性解放與現代想像——思想史視野中的‘娜拉’ (Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, 2014), 48–65.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zhuyuan Han

Zhuyuan Han is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include modern Chinese print culture, women’s studies and feminism, and critical theory. Her current research project is about the interactions between educated women and new knowledge in Republican China.