China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Nicole Huang, University of California, Berkeley
Chair: Theodore Huters, University of California, Los Angeles
Discussant: Wen-hsin Yeh, University of California, Berkeley
This panel constructs a historical narrative of a vital cultural genre in twentieth-century China: women’s magazines. Collectively, we address the following theoretical issues: How have women’s magazines contributed in shaping and transforming the ideal of a modern womanhood? What has been the relationship between an urban consumer culture that is often distinguished as ‘female’ and a flourishing print culture that is directed toward a predominantly female readership? In what ways have women’s magazines served as a point of convergence for discourses of Chinese modernity and nationalism, as well as women’s education, employment, familial structures, and female sexuality? In addressing these questions, our research also throws new light on the role of print culture in the unfolding of modern urban history.
We pursue the above issues across a century of women’s popular publishing. Barbara Mittler describes the construction of an "everyday science" and the image of a "new woman" in the earliest magazines published around the turn of the century; Constance Orliski takes us into early Republican era and examines the connection between household sanitation, family hygiene, and efforts to mobilize in the midst of mounting national crises; Nicole Huang positions the production of women’s magazines within an extraordinary historical moment—the Japanese occupation of Shanghai—exploring the formation of a community of (female) public intellectuals; and finally, Perry Johansson offers us a contemporary perspective through his critique of the collusion between official discourses and the marketplace as reflected in the conflicting messages presented in one women’s magazine.
Barbara Mittler, University of Heidelberg
The primary purpose of early women’s magazines was didactic. They all acknowledged their interest in teaching and forming a "new woman." Surprisingly, however, the "new woman" prescribed in these magazines does not look quite so new after all. Even explicitly "feminist" journals such as Nüzi shijie or Zhongguo xinnüjie zazhi, which in their editorials demanded acceptance of the new values of equality and emancipation, most often printed articles dealing with the type of knowledge to be used in household affairs. The aim of women’s education was the creation of good mothers for China’s (male?) citizens. For this purpose, these magazines explained not only how to be self-confident and how to take part in a demonstration, but also how to make clothes, how to be a good cook, and how to beautify one’s body. And while women might be introduced to science in these magazines, it was a particular type of riyongkexue, science for everyday, teaching how to get rid of nasty insects or how to use a gas-light. Similarly, knowledge of management was taught exclusively as jiazheng, household management. Here, a woman could learn how best to deal with her crying infant and how to prepare a nutritional meal. Was this apparent bias the ultimate answer to the women’s question in Qing China? This paper intends to ask who prescribed the particular value system in women’s magazines and why. It will also show, however, that there was indeed something new in the portrayal of these "old women."
Constance Orliski, University of Southern California
In the early 1900s, many of the writers for the female press blamed women’s status as virtual prisoners of domestic chores for much of China’s national and international infirmity. By the mid-1910s, however, salvation for the diseased nation had come to depend on the bourgeois domestic manager’s grasp of modern housekeeping and health care practices. In my paper, I argue that the articles written about household sanitation and family hygiene are among the most didactic of those which appeared in women’s journals during the early Republican period. Throughout these discussions, various authorities endeavored to teach the homemaker that part of her role was that of domestic scientist. Understanding the body of the home, family and nation as a unified entity, she was tutored in the significance of and methods for measuring it, disinfecting it, cleansing it of impurities which might be lingering from the past, taking its temperature, nourishing it, clothing it, revitalizing it. Yet, much of this advice simply offered new ways (scientific principles, bio-science in nutrition, etc.) to comprehend very familiar processes and activities. Often there was even a "brave new world" set of images of things remote and almost inconceivable which made an association with high technology and western ways of living seem hopelessly inapplicable to one’s actual daily life. All of this becomes clear in women’s own writings on the subject wherein the homemaker’s cleaning regimen and approach to protecting the health of the family remains virtually unchanged from what it had been in the past.
Nicole Huang, University of California, Berkeley
This is a study of popular journals intended for an urban female readership in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the first half of the 1940s. What is unique about the cultural space created by these publications is that women writers and journalists played a crucial role in reshaping the structure of public knowledge, defining the boundaries between life and work, devising everyday survival strategies for women both inside and outside the household, and, most importantly, promoted themselves as important cultural commentators. I will focus on Women’s Voices, Happy Home Monthly, Healthy Home Monthly, and several other home journals from the period to demonstrate how cultural interventions by Shanghai women persevered in the midst of the intricate political strictures and the social/economic confinements that resulted from the war-time occupation. My central question is: What does it mean to emphasize cultural reconstruction by urban women in the flourishing sphere of popular print media at a historical moment that is conventionally characterized by themes of death, hunger, scarcity, turbulence, destruction, and transience?
Perry Johansson, Stockholm University
Although a number of ‘advertising friendly’ magazines have hit the market recently, the majority of China’s women’s magazines are still published by the Women’s Federation. Nüyou, published by the Women’s Federation in Xian, is a tremendously popular magazine among its young female readership. It has proven to be just as popular with the beauty product industry, with advertising space increasing steadily. Chinese consumer culture has already generated a number of new and problematic female practices as debates on beauty contests and "eating the fruits of youth" have shown. In this paper, I want to address the issue focusing on the question of state media and commercialization. In a reading of Nüyou between 1994–1996, I will ask the following questions: Does advertising affect the editorial content in a magazine like Nüyou (since advertisements and editorials dealing with how to enlarge the breasts and how to obtain a slimmer body sometimes appear side by side with politically correct stories of female role models)? Is it official discourse or consumer culture that informs the definitions of what it means to become a woman? And finally, whose friend is Nüyou really?