Feminist Voices in Public Practices: Women Journalists in China

This talk presents how female journalists defended women’s public roles in the 1930s when the conservative nationalist government promoted women’s domesticity and chastity. Women journalists criticized the state for its political impotence, male politicians for using women as diplomatic tools, chauvinist men for imposing double burden (both career and family) on women. From female perspectives, women journalists explore the social significance of a sing-song girl’s expelling from school, a widowed concubine’s remarriage, and a female assassin’s trial in the context of conservative nationalism. They mediated between feminist aspirations and the state regulation of women, between the party-lines and women’s interests, and between male proposals and female needs.