Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China

Abstract

Gender, Politics, and Democracy offers an account of Chinese women's struggles for political suffrage from around the turn of the twentieth century to the eve of the Communist victory in 1949. Edwards argues that the term “canzheng,” suggesting political participation in general, was understood by female political activists in the first half of the twentieth century in the more concrete sense of “suffrage,” “centring on the twin rights to vote and to stand for election associated with the ful...