Making Culture Modern: Transnational Women’s Organizations and Reform Movements in Turn-of-the-Century China and Japan

Organizer: Elizabeth Littell-Lamb, St. Bonaventure

Chair: Andrew Hamish Ion, Royal Military Academy of Canada

Discussant: Andrew Morris, California Polytechnic State University

Around the turn of the century transnational women’s organizations provided ideas and support for Chinese and Japanese women’s reform movements. This panel uses three of these reform movements to probe how Chinese and Japanese women localized transnational ideas in an effort to modernize their societies, and how their reforms intersected with issues of gender, class and national identity. Elizabeth Dorn Lublin examines WCTU temperance activism in Japan during the Meiji period. These years witnessed growth in the production and consumption of Western alcoholic beverages in line with the thinking that would make Japan more civilized. Conversely, WCTU members considered abstinence essential to national progress and devised arguments and implemented activities promoting temperance to further Japan's modernization. Carol C. Chin explores the transnational links between the Chinese women's suffrage movement and international suffrage organizations. Chinese activists paid close attention to the tactics of American and British suffragists, and Western suffrage leaders applauded the energy and boldness of the Chinese women. They shared a belief that Chinese women's political participation was essential to constructing China as a modern nation. Elizabeth Littell-Lamb examines transnational women’s organizations effort to reform the modern world after the carnage of WWI by working to create a global community based on Christian social justice. In China, the YWCA campaigned to restrict child labor in Shanghai’s International Settlement. Localizing women’s international agenda, however, proved problematic. The campaign became embroiled in Shanghai politics and ultimately was caught in the crossfire of events leading up to the May 30^th Incident.

Elizabeth Dorn Lublin, Wayne State University

Following Japan's opening in the mid-19th century, the country's leaders embarked on a program of national strengthening and enrichment to achieve equality with the Western powers. Their efforts ranged from the passage of a constitution and the building of Japan's first railroad lines to the promotion of Western dressing, eating, and drinking habits. Informing these reforms was the belief that, by adopting such Western institutions and ways, Japan would become more modern and more enlightened. The impact of this thinking proved particularly strong with respect to consumption of champagne, sherry, whiskey, and wine, and contributed to significant imports of foreign alcohol and much investment in the development of a domestic brewing industry during the Meiji era. Ironically, another idea gained currency in Japan because of its association with advanced civilization: temperance. Protestant missionaries, mainly from the United States, began to espouse this Puritan value in the late 1850s, and themselves equated it with enlightenment. That link became even more sharply established with the introduction of organized temperance activism by the World WCTU in the 1880s. This paper briefly discusses the origins of WCTU outreach against the backdrop of Japan's changing drinking culture and then examines the arguments and activities of the Japanese middle-class women who joined. In particular, it will contend that Japanese WCTU members felt an abiding sense of national duty to further Japan's progress and saw the widespread acceptance of temperance as essential to the country's drive to become modern and gain the respect of the Western world.

Carol Chin, University of Toronto, Canada

In the early years of the twentieth century, Chinese feminists sought to redefine women's roles in order to help shape a modern Chinese nation. One of the most visible campaigns, launched even before the advent of the Republic, was for the right to vote and to participate fully in the public sphere. They argued that women's political participation would contribute to strengthening the nation, to enable it to survive and compete in the modern world. The suffragists founded such organizations as the Chinese Women's Suffrage Alliance, the Chinese Women's Republic Alliance, and others, and promoted their cause through articles and editorials in newly launched women’s magazines. They kept close watch on international suffrage movements, describing the rationales, tactics, and political struggles of their counterparts in the United States and Britain. Western suffragists returned the attention, regularly reporting on the Chinese movement in Jus Suffragi, the periodical of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA). IWSA leaders Carrie Chapman Catt and Aletta Jacobs visited China on their world tour, bringing back optimistic assessments of Chinese progress. This paper explores the transnational links between the Chinese and international women's suffrage movements. It argues that although the Western organizations did not directly support or direct the Chinese movement, they shared a belief that Chinese women's political participation was essential to constructing China as a modern nation.

Elizabeth Littell-Lamb, St. Bonaventure University

Horrified by the carnage of World War I, transnational women's organizations politicized and spent the next the next quarter century promoting the causes of peace and social justice, working tirelessly to create a global community based on Western liberalism and Christian social justice. One of these organizations, the World YWCA, charged its national organizations throughout the West and Asia to take up these causes. In the early 1920s the Chinese YWCA organized a coalition of Shanghai women's clubs, studied labor conditions and lobbied the Shanghai Municipal Council to restrict child labor in the International Settlement. The coalition then launched an aggressive campaign to get the legislation passed. This paper examines the problems the Chinese YWCA faced in translating women’s transnational vision to the realities of Shanghai’s International Settlement to explain why the campaign failed and why the Chinese YWCA was actually relieved when it did. By 1925 the campaign was entangled in political debates that ranged from women's public roles to Chinese national sovereignty. Shanghai’s stalwartly patriarchal business community virulently objected to women "meddling" in city matters. When the Municipal Council linked the proposed legislation to a by-law censoring the Chinese press, Chinese residents in the International Settlement decried both by-laws as further trespasses on China's sovereignty. Women, especially Chinese women, found themselves embroiled in these debates and ultimately were caught in the crossfire of events that led up to the May 30^th Incident and the eventual failure of the campaign.