Feminism in the vernacular: Baihua writing, gender, and identity in late Qing China

Abstract

This article explores the significant yet neglected role of women as active practitioners of baihua writing, a newly created vernacular journalistic style, in the context of nationalism in early twentieth-century China. While nationalist vernacular journalists of the time constructed baihua as a utilitarian medium for nationalist propaganda and the lower classes, women vernacular writers appropriated this nationalism-inflected, class-based style as a new mode of vernacular writing aligned with progressiveness and their advocacy of feminism. Examining a group of feminist vernacular journalistic writings penned by Chinese female overseas students in Japan, this paper shows how these feminist vernacular journalists sought to develop baihua to empower their expression of feminism and to redress and transcend Chinese women’s subjugated feminine condition in the context of nationalism. Through this articulation of vernacular feminism, the feminist vernacular writers attempted to create a new national collective identity as actors of sociopolitical practice for Chinese women.