Researing On Women’Haircutting Ofl920₁930. With Consciousness As Key Issue

Without social status and personality, women suffer from oppression in the longfeudal society. The traditional think--women are inferior to men lead to unequaltreatment. Under traditional culture of the three obediences obeying her fatherbefore marriage, her husband when married, and her sons in widowhood and thefour virtues (morality, proper speech, modest manner and diligent work), thestatus of women fall to the bottom of society; at the same time, the female’sindependent personality is monopolized. With the steps of aggression into China, ournation faces peril. Realizing the importance of women for the national destiny, theadvanced intellectuals, using the Mean Guns such as evolutionary theory, advocated“the Equality between Men and Women” and put forward the theory of womanlearning and wasting harmless. In1911, revolutionaries finally admitted the equalitybetween men and women; in the meantime, Nanjing government allows women towork in the government. Since then, women had certain of social status. However,Yuan-shikai stole revolutionary fruit and issued a series of anachronistic policy thathinders the development of the society, blocking the women’s liberation. The May4thMovement lifted the climax of the women’s liberation movement, enlightening focuson women’s issues.In the process of women’s liberation, women endeavored to fight for the rightsand interests such as equality between men and women, freedom of marriage. Thechange of women’ idea and thought could be shown from their external change. In theearly of20thcentury, they made hair-cutting to give a best evidence of the ideologychanges, which caused the attention and even attack from all parties. Under thecrackdown of powerful feudal conservatives, the hair-cutting movement graduallydisappeared. The May4th Movement inspired the flame of women’s movement again.Women used their own practical action and unremitting efforts to indicate theirthought progress, which aroused extensive attention from the whole society. A great number of discussions and the readings were published on the Supplement ofPublican Daily-Awakening, which gave much more profound understanding towardswomen’ hair-cutting movement.Women hair-cutting movement repeatedly and difficultly conducted just likesocial and customs transformation. In the process of the development appeareddifferentiation towards this movement. Different women looked at this phenomenonwith different cognition which developed into different levels finally. The women’shair-cutting movement showed only in the external changes and couldn’t fullyembody the thought of consciousness. The true liberation was the ideologicalawareness and personality consciously mentioned in the Awakening.