Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China by Louise Edwards (review)

Louise Edwards presents the first comprehensive study of Chinese women’s suffrage movement in Gender, Politics, and Democracy. Tracing the evolution of the pragmatic struggle of Chinese suffragists in the first half of the twentieth century, Edwards uncovers women’s agency by revealing their militant challenges to gendered political norms. Rejecting a teleological view of the suffrage movement from no female franchise to female franchise, Edwards unveils the intertwined relationship between feminism and nationalism in China’s rapidly changing political contexts, and, therefore, pinpoints the fluidity and adaptability of both feminism and nationalism at particular historical junctures. As Edwards has forcibly shown, even under the hegemony of nationalism, Chinese women developed a clear feminist agenda and created a collective political identity across party and class lines that changed China’s gendered political landscape.

The running theme of the book is how Chinese suffragists strategically used the twin logic in the gender argument—women are equal to men versus the two sexes are essentially different—at appropriate historical moments to advance their cause of winning the vote and improving women’s lives. As chapter 2 reveals, in the last decade of the Qing dynasty, women revolutionaries used the equality argument to promote a new identity as equally capable citizens who deserved the right as much as men to serve the nation in the political realm. Upholding nationalism with a clear anti-Manchu tone, women radicals like Qiu Jin participated in political and military actions to overthrow the Manchu rule. Institutionally excluded from political power in imperial China, women revolutionaries hoped that their contribution to establishing a constitutional democracy would legitimize their access to political rights as independent, individual citizens equal to men.

Yet the new republic consistently betrayed its women revolutionaries by denying them suffrage rights. The first few years of the fragile republican democracy, however, witnessed continuing militant efforts of women suffragists to push their political cause forward, as depicted in chapter 3. Women fought their way through lobbying, demonstrations, marching on parliament, and even window smashing in order to get the phrase “regardless of sex” inserted in the constitution to safeguard women’s legal equality. Although radical women’s organizations were banned and women’s suffrage offices raided, their challenges to male privilege laid the foundation for later success.

Up until the mid 1910s, the Chinese women’s suffrage movement had an elitist outlook and had been led by enlightened women fighting for political rights that had only been enjoyed by elite men. The intellectual ferment of the iconoclastic New Culture Movement changed the discursive milieu of women’s suffrage, making it a more acceptable notion among the educated. Chapter 4 demonstrates that women suffragists successfully lobbied the Guangdong and Hunan governments to add gender equality into provincial constitutions in the early 1920s. However, political fragmentation in the warlord era made a similar victory at a national level impossible. While devoting their energy to national unification, the new meaning of nationalism of the time, women activists began to show an increasing awareness of class. They started to mobilize the argument for gender difference to stress the collectivity of women as a politically disadvantaged group relative to men.

Women became recognized as a disadvantaged group in the era of the first United Front, when both the Nationalists and the Communists endorsed the principle of equality between men and women. As Edwards shows in chapter 5, both parties privileged their political goals, focusing on national unification or class struggle over the suffrage movement. The Communists in particular remained skeptical of suffragists and dismissed their efforts as bourgeois feminism. Women suffragists, however, maintained the momentum of the franchise movement through their continued lobbying, with the logic that women deserved political representation because of their collective unity of disadvantage.

Edwards convincingly argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, feminist activism was not silenced by the White Terror and did not lose its strength under the...