The subject of this talk is a new demographic of women in early twentieth century China, “Republican Ladies:” women who were more visible than their talented late imperial forebears and more respectable than their infamously public courtesan contemporaries. The source base includes photographs and texts that appeared in China’s first commercial women’s journal, Funü Shibao (The women’s eastern times, Shanghai 1911-1917), a journal committed to calling the new Republican woman into being. The presentation probes the links between this self-conscious reconstitution of Chinese womanhood and the constitution of early Republican culture and politics.
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