Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press by Judge, Joan (review)

The cover of the first issue of the journal Funü shibao (婦女時報 The women’s eastern times; dated June 11, 1911) features an ink painting of two girls in a shadowy outdoor space, one turned away, exposing the nape of her neck under a smoothly trailing braid, the other in profile. Countering a long pictorial history of erotic images of women, they do not look into a mirror reflecting and revealing their faces to entrance the beholder’s eye; instead they gaze at a copy of the very journal on which their likeness appears. The picture within a picture thus makes critical social and visual interventions: it suggests that a new way of seeing women will be made available to readers of the journal, and it further suggests that the curious public peering over the girls’ shoulders to identify what it is that they find so fascinating—men and women alike—will want to be those readers.

Joan Judge’s study of early Republican-era women through the lens of Funü shibao deftly demonstrates the promise of the cover. Setting aside previous easy designations of the journal as “popular” or “common, ” “middlebrow, ” “China’s first commercial women’s journal, ” and potentially “feminist, ” Judge instead seeks out the contradictions and ambiguities in the look and content of the journal, asking how it functioned, practically and materially, to shape and refract women’s experience of modern life. What did it mean for a journal published and edited by men to be authored by women? How did representations of women’s everyday life intersect with grand narratives about the new nation? What was the relationship of the editors’ reformist agendas to commercial objectives?

Discussion of “experience” (實驗談 shiyantan) is at the heart of the journal and Judge’s project. The journal’s editor, Bao Tianxiao (包天笑 1876–1973), solicited accounts from contributors that were based on their immediate everyday experience. Their language speaks to a heightened awareness of the range of women’s perspectives on daily life: “muji (to witness), yueli (to experience), lilian (to learn through experience) and guanjiansuoji (in my limited view)” (90). Judge’s method similarly shifts perspectives on women’s experience by zooming in toward the journal (to analyze its pages with an eye to nuances of language, logic, pictures, and opinion) and zooming out (to place it within broader epistemological, social, and print contexts).

In chapter 1, Judge introduces the editors and main male and female contributors, and she begins to elucidate the editor’s complicated politics, characterized by Judge as “progressive but circumspect” (37). She also provides meticulous quantitative analysis of the journal as a printed object published erratically from 1911 to 1917 at the Shibao Office’s Youzheng Book Company in the treaty-port city of Shanghai (sales across China were relatively high, at 6, 000–7, 000 copies per issue). The journal, we learn, featured a kaleidoscope of photographs, columns from editors and readers, fiction (original and in translation), biography, poetry talks, travel accounts, instructions on sewing and cooking, short essays, miscellaneous reflections, and advertisements, as well as a literary section composed of poems and lyrics conveying a poetics of daily life.

Chapters 2 and 3 take up the “Republican Ladies” and the writing they contributed to the journal, respectively. The journal was for forward-looking, genteel ladies, the first generation of public professional women, and female students in new-style schools, though only roughly half of its contents were by them. Through acute attention to tone, rhetoric, and style, Judge assesses the journal’s gendered authority. Judge finds that the topics on which women wrote exemplified the modern moment. One prolific author, Wang Jieliang (汪傑梁 dates unknown), for instance, contributed an article in which “she encouraged families to spend their vacations collecting natural science specimens (bowu biaoben), acquiring on-site experience, painting landscapes and investigating local customs” (76). But contributors also favored long-lived forms...