Bound to emancipate: Management of lower-class women in 1920s and 1930s urban South China

My study analyzes state regulation and public debates of lower-class women service laborers who were commonly identified as prostitutes, teahouse waitresses, singers and household laborers, but who also moved between industries and across the borders between rural and urban Guangzhou and Hong Kong in the 1920s and 1930s. The stigmatizing and sexualizing of lower-class women laborers were central to the ways that Hong Kong and Guangzhou city residents crafted their exclusivist notions of urban citizenship. "Women's emancipation (jiefang)," much emphasized in May Fourth rhetoric, was interpreted differently in the two cities. In Hong Kong, "emancipation" meant freedom from Chinese influence as well as colonial control; in Guangzhou, it was part of the process of modernizing the city, but also symbolized the political tactic of the Communist Party, which privileged class over gender in its movement against social inequalities. The metaphor of freeing an enslaved/bound woman's body often appeared in local discussions and social campaigns in both cities as a way to mobilize the population to empower women to become agents and citizens. Nevertheless, as these "emancipated" women started to appear more casually in public venues in the late 1920s and early 1930s, morality became a concern for local authorities. Through looking at various social campaigns, I explicate how "emancipation" and the right of citizenship for lower class women were restricted by their gender and sexual behaviors.; My study also challenges the nation-based framework of history which continues to influence our historiography of Hong Kong and China by arguing that the categories of "city" and "region" were more pertinent than "nation" to the lower class migrants who were willing to work in any urban setting, disregarding distances and national boundaries. It contributes to the existing scholarship of modern urban Chinese history by reorienting our focus from popular cities such as Shanghai to a scarcely explored region of South China, and its concentration on two cities separated by political rule reveals the complexity and contradictions underlying the discourses of emancipation, which were both distinctive and representative in early 20th century China.