Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (review)

Although we must take with a grain of salt the promotional claim that this book is "the first history of Chinese May Fourth feminism," Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories is indeed the first work to unravel the mysteries surrounding the promulgation of feminist ideals in early twentieth-century May Fourth China. Until now, critics of Chinese feminism have been wrestling with the following questions: Why did so many educated males promote feminism? Why did women themselves willingly connect the goals of women's liberation to those of national revolutions? What kinds of women were attracted to the feminist discourse and political movements? More pointedly, what were the political outcomes for Chinese women who had once devoted themselves to women's emancipation and the revolutions?

Wang Zheng's book fully answers these questions. The author organizes her book into two parts. The first part offers a detailed analysis of the formation of the May Fourth feminist discourse, and the second part presents and examines the life stories told by five May Fourth female activists who have been left out of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) canon on women's liberation. If the author purported merely to rewrite women into history, the book would be just an expanded edition of Christina Gilmartin's Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s (University of California Press, 1995), a reevaluation of communist women's roles and positions within the CCP. The significance of Wang's book lies in its implication that it may be misleading for us to use a male/female polarity as the only lens by which to look into Chinese women's invisibility in history. Unlike in the Euro-American context, May Fourth males played leading roles in women's movements, and the CCP's master narrative has made some women preeminent. Given these facts, to transplant the sexual dualism that dominates Western feminist thinking to contemporary Chinese history may blind us to some other underpinning elements of patriarchy. The oral narratives by Wang's heroines reveal profoundly that the marginalization of women stems not only from gender hierarchy but also from the dominant discourse of the CCP, which dictates who is allowed visibility and deserves the public memory. The purpose of the Party, as Wang suggests, is to construct an exclusive history of revolutionary heroines for the enhancement of its image as the savior of women. In this regard, Wang's book cautions against misleading presumptions that may jeopardize cross-cultural studies of feminism.

This is an exhaustive work, as the author's footnotes and primary references prove. To contextualize her heroines, Wang begins her book by tracing the origins and development of May Fourth feminism to the late Qing dynasty (1644 - 1911). The details are precise and comprehensive. For example, Wang is able to say that between 1897 and 1921, "out of forty women's periodicals and newspapers published in Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, and other cities, the majority were run by women" (p. 40; emphasis mine). Delineating the complicated concurrent debates and consequences, Wang clearly tells who started anti-footbinding and advocacy for women's rights as well as when and how Western individualism started to have an impact on the creation of the New Woman. The reader walks at ease through a textual history from Kang Youwei's Datong shu and Jin Tianhe's Nüjie zhong (The women's bell) to women's articles in women's journals, including articles by Qiu Jin; from Chen Duxiu's essays in the periodical New Youth to Hu Shi's speeches and writings; and from Zhou Zouren's translations to the articles by his brother, Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren). Wang recognizes that the early Chinese feminism was a male-made discourse. But with a gendered critical edge, she convincingly points out that the...