Writings about women's political activities in China during the first half of the 20th century have generally shared the view that the national struggle between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang (KMT) foreclosed the possibilities of an independent women's movement; there has, therefore, not been much to tell about the issue of women's suffrage. Louise Edwards's impressive volume puts paid to this argument. In this first comprehensive examination of Chinese women's campaigns for suffrage and equal political rights, Edwards argues that from the early 20th century on, women fought both for their own political interests and for those of the broader national movement. As political activists they were all nationalists, but their struggle on the basis of a platform of “collective disadvantage” succeeded in convincing male political leaders that women's suffrage was a necessary component of the broader national movement for democratic reform, and indeed could make significant contributions to it. Rather than arguing that feminism became subsumed within a nationalist movement that overlooked, marginalized or used feminist interests, Edwards argues that nationalism and feminism emerged almost simultaneously as linked but distinct movements.
Edwards develops her argument through a chronological sequence beginning with the elite activists, many of whom had studied in Japan, at the turn of the century. As women's access to education increased after 1898, their claims for political rights were strengthened by their growing realization of the limits of the natural rights argument as a platform for national strengthening; with education, women's bodies and physiologies could no longer define the limits of their political and social capacities. Following the discussions to promote female education and family reform in the Mutual Love Societies in the early years of the 20th century, the two years after the founding of the Republic marked the first really significant stage of women's attempts to gain an institutional footing for their political participation and representation. Undaunted by the early nationalist leaders' political ambivalence over the issues of women's rights, and outraged by Yuan Shikai's government's ban on women's political involvement, women began to take advantage of the spaces for political activity created by provincial independence, within the framework of the United Women's Associations. It was within the new organizational initiatives of the early May Fourth period that discussion about women's collective disadvantage started, moving on to include debates about the political status of concubines. Are they women too? The challenge such a question posed to the accepted hierarchy between notions of women's sexualized virtue and men's “political virtue” was symptomatic of the increasingly confident assertion that women's political interests were fundamentally different from men's and thus merited separate arrangements. By the early 1920s, women had joined forces with the anti-imperialist stance of the contending political parties to ensure that neither neglected women's issues; women's suffrage had already become accepted across the political board as a necessary component of China's claims to modern status in an international world.
Into the late 1920s and the 1930s, women's insistence on stating their case on the basis of “collective disadvantage” continued, despite the political rivalries of the parties with which they were allied. The struggle for quotas for women in legal and political bodies continued. Associated with the Kuomintang government, women may have upheld the “traditional associations” made between women and the “inner” sphere, but they simultaneously continued to discuss the need to fight for their political rights. The New Life movement cannot therefore be simplistically written off as a transparent exercise of extreme conservativism. In the communist movement, an independent women's voice was also heard during the anti-Japanese war era in the form of demands for quotas of women's seats on political and legislative bodies. If by the 1940s, implementation of the victories women had obtained in gaining recognition of their political rights seemed limited, this was largely because of the constraints on implementing democratic government under the conditions of the anti-Japanese and civil war.
By the 1920s, women's activism on behalf of their own political rights had succeeded in promoting new ideas and practices of democratic representation for the political system as a whole. Edwards argues that this success of the women's suffrage movement can be explained in two main ways. Its early development aside, the women's suffrage increasingly mobilized cross-class support. And in contrast with the schisms within the European movement of the same period, Edwards argues that a “unique unity” characterized the development of the women's movement across political parties between 1911 and 1940. Here her argument weakens, in part maybe because of the limitations of her data. Little evidence is provided from the journals of the time on which she relies for her sources to sustain her view of the broad social appeal of the suffrage cause. Little biographical detail of women activists is provided beyond those to whom other scholars have already introduced us. And if the “unique unity” refers to the dual party and marital affiliations of many of the women's movement's leaders, then to what extent did such unity characterize the commitments of the participants of the broader movement whose efforts were necessarily bound by the conflict between the major parties?
Throughout her narrative, Edwards refers to the links and parallels, including the use of violence, between the Chinese suffragists and the international women's movement. Chinese activists were well informed about what was happening in Europe at the time; European activists also had access to sporadic news items about the women's movement in China. The importance of this volume then lies not only in adding an important piece to our jigsaw of knowledge about the political visions and disappointments across five decades for which Chinese women fought in the early 20th century. It also firmly places Chinese women's challenges to foundational masculinist conceptions of political power on the map of the international women's movement.
