Description
Book SynopsisIn Engendering the Woman Question, Zhang Yun adopts a new approach to examining the early Chinese women’s periodical press. Rather than seeing this new print and publishing genre as a gendered site coded as either “feminine” or “masculine,” this book approaches it as a mixed-gender public space where both men and women were intellectually active and involved in dynamic interactions to determine the contours of their discursive encounters. Drawing upon a variety of novel textual modes such as polemical essays, historical biography, public speech, and expository essays, this book opens a window onto men’s and women’s gender-specific approaches to a series of prominent topics central to the Chinese woman question in the early twentieth century.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Figures Introduction 1 Articulating the Woman Question: Women’s Literary Heritage, Education, and the Nation 1 The Mixed-Gender Public Space in Nü xuebao 2 Debates on the Cainü Legacy 3 Asserting Intellectual Authority in the Public Space 4 Ambivalence: a Debate of Linguistic Registers 5 Conclusion 2 Nationalism and Beyond: Nüjie and the Construction of a New Gendered Collective Identity 1 The Cure for the Nation: Mobilizing Nüjie 2 A Nüjie of Their Own 3 Beyond Nationalism: Demanding a Revolution in Nüjie 4 Conclusion 3 The Manchu Woman Commits Suicide: Ethnicity and the Composition of the New Chinese Woman 1 A Sacrificial Martyr for a National Cause 2 Making a Manchu Heroine 3 Ethnicity and Gender: Manchu Women’s Envisioning of Modern Womanhood 4 Conclusion 4 Fashioning Hygienic Womanhood: Women’s Health and Bodies in Commercial Women’s Journals 1 The Mixed-Gender Public Space of the Commercial Women’s Journals: Male Editorial Agency and Female Authorial Subjectivity 2 The Ideal of “Wise Mothers and Good Wives” 3 Women and Weisheng in the Household 4 Women’s Hygiene and Reproductive Health 4.1 Menstruation 4.2 Childbirth 5 Conclusion 5 Policing Girl Students 1 Female Students in the Late Qing 2 The Republican Girl Students 3 Debates on Girl Students 4 Personal Accounts from Girl Students 5 Conclusion Conclusion Works Cited Index
