An Analysis Of A Woman’s Messenger And The Construction Of The New Woman Discourse In The Early Republican China,1912-1922

In the Early Republican China, when the fall of the Qing Dynasty put an end to two thousand years of Imperial rule, a small group of elite educated women leave the comfort of their homes and took the "plume" to address the matter of gender and redefine the very concept of Women inherited from the traditional Chinese society. In a very valiant attempt to make their voices heard and bring women into the public sphere, these women invaded the so-called Men’s World using different narrative spaces to debate about the states of affair of an era of rapid changes.One of those narrative spaces was A Woman’s Messenger, a Chinese Protestant women’s journal that began to circulate in Shanghai under the sponsorship of the "Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge Among the Chinese" A Woman’s Messenger goal was to promote Christianity, Women’s Morality, Christian Family Values, and introduce the Modernization of Women to bourgeois educated classes. Under a western ethical and religious framework, A Woman’s Messenger encouraged women to step out of the home and to broaden their concerns from family issues to social and national issues. Embracing certain western traditions and incoming inspirations, it’s writers discussed concepts like the "New Chinese women","Womanhood" and "Femininity" by questioning their role in the Chinese Family, Education, Literature, Religion and History. In its columns and editorials female writers, most of them girls student from Christian schools, addressed the present progress of the Chinese women in education, the role of women on war, the relation between women and patriotism, Modern Marriage Customs, and other topics concerning the new role of the women in the Chinese national renewal. They displayed their own survey about the social and political status of women in the modern China and accepted the challenge to rewrite the Confucian stereotypical gender role that portrayed them as the one who are to yield to, to assent, to serve.Through the analysis of the A Woman’s Messenger, this study would like to conduct an historical research about the changes of the women’s status in China between the years of1912and1922, addressing the textual and critical discourses produced by them in order to elucidate how their writing reflected their historical and religious setting. I would like to examine how these women addressed the "Women’s Problem" and which were the textual strategies that they employed to forge their cultural resistance. Also, I would like to emphasize how women writers, editors, and publishers transformed certain literary, cultural and religious traditions for their own use, insisted on using their own methods of writing and publishing, and thereby resisted the literary conventions and political structures of their time. Finally, I would like to investigate how the foreign colonial and missionary presence and the translation of western fiction further broadened discussions of the place of women in China.