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The New Woman played a central role in the late-Victorian British feminist discourse, making a leading contribution to social debate as she engaged with rational dress, debates over maternal roles, and the suffrage movement. However, in some instances British feminism was implicated in imperialism. While the New Woman was a late-Victorian British term, Chinese writers embraced the feminist thoughts shared by these British writers, and developed their own New Woman aesthetics, challenging patriarchal norms in the feudalist Qing and early Republican China. While they shared some common ground, the New Woman in both countries addressed different cultural and political concerns. She was often also misrepresented in fiction and the press in Britain, and misunderstood in China.
I situate both these groups of feminist writers within the context of imperialism and nationalism, investigating their presentations of the anti-footbinding movement by Alicia Litte (1845-1926) and Qiu Jin (1875-1907), education by Sarah Grand (1854-1943) and Tang Yisuo (1860 -?), marriage by Mona Caird (1854-1932) and Lu Yin (1898-1934), labour by Ella Hepworth Dixon (1857-1932) and revolutionary work by Ding Ling (1904-1986). Through comparative analysis, I explore the underlying political and cultural dynamics of early feminist ideas across two cultures, addressing the shared concerns of British and Chinese feminist writers.
In extending the purview of New Woman writing from late Victorian Britain to modern China from the 1890s to the 1940s, I situate female emancipation within anti-Qing and anti-imperialism revolutions, demonstrating ways in which Chinese feminist writers sought to overturn the Chinese political system. I argue that women’s writing in revolutionary China (1930s-1940s) was distinct from that of its British counterparts through its bringing together of female liberation and national emancipation but that at the same time British socialist feminism posed a challenge to the deeply patriarchal structure of capitalist structures of power.
Exploring how Chinese New Woman writing developed into a revolutionary force as it responded to foreign invasions and aligned with an emergent nationalism, the thesis demonstrates the theoretical struggle of the Chinese writers and also argues for the revolutionary praxis of the New Woman in both Britain and China. |
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