In this volume Doris Chang provides a much-needed comprehensive summary of the history of women's activism in Taiwan. English-language studies of Chinese women's movements are dominated by stories of the Chinese “mainland” and often focus on domestic, rather than regional or global, influences. Chang's volume shows us that these works have minimized, inadvertently or not, the considerable interchange between women activists on the mainland, Japan and Taiwan, and the interconnectedness of the three locations during the last century. In relating the story of Taiwanese women's activism, Chang's volume provides us with an understanding of how their interrelatedness had concrete impacts on the shape, style and goals of major social movements in North-East Asia. Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan also shows us the post-war processes of localizing “Western” feminism within Taiwan's particular cultural and political context. The volume reveals the many distinctive features of the Taiwan women's movement as it forged a unique trajectory within the transnational world of feminism.
The book is organized chronologically taking the reader from the beginnings of women's activism under the Japanese colonial rule between 1895 and 1945, through to the end of the 20th century. Chang provides a comprehensive outline of the key campaigns around which women activists mobilized. She takes readers through the movements to enhance women's rights in marriage and access to education of the 1920s inspired by the New Culture Movement and Japanese feminist publications such as Seito (Bluestocking). Women's activism around labour conditions and wages emerged as central parts of the movement from the mid-1920s within a vibrant (but soon suppressed) communist movement. Between the late 1940s and 1970s martial law provisions identified feminist activity as subversive and hampered women's antagonistic activism as well as left-wing action. Moreover, women's independent activism was deemed unnecessary because of the simultaneous formation of government-sponsored Taiwan Provincial Women's Association around the island. With Song Mei-ling as their leader, these associations continued the programmes of the New Life Movement and repackaged women's activism as philanthropy, motherhood and anti-communism with Chiang Kai-shek as patriarch of the national family.
With the increase in political freedoms from the mid 1970s, the pace of the women's movement increases as women adopted a legal “rights-based” programme. Campaigns for access to legal abortions, protection for underage prostitutes and against proposals that would place an upper limit on women's access to university places expanded as the social and political climate permitted. University academics also provided support for the movement in the mid 1980s with the commencement of women's studies programmes. Prominent among these was the population studies centre at National Taiwan University, which hosted the women's research programme. In the late 1980s National Tsinghua University launched its research programme on gender and society, further cementing the academic study of women and gender in Taiwan. These programmes are major loci for undergraduate and postgraduate training in women's studies.
In keeping with international developments in women's activism and women-centred scholarship through the 1990s, Taiwan's activists explored the challenges of heterosexual biases embedded in social norms. In so doing groups like the X-Centric Sisters forged a notion of “Woman-identified Woman” (nüren rentong nüren) to move away from the labels straight and lesbian that implied the latter “deviated” from the supposed “norm” of the former. Women activists have in subsequent years been central to the current debates about same-sex marriage and legislative reforms to secure equality for same-sex couples more generally.
In addition to the narrative about the major campaigns and ideologies underpinning these campaigns, readers are also provided with detailed descriptions of key figures such as Hsiu-lien Annette Lu. Now recognized internationally for her role as Vice-President of the Republic of China between 2000 and 2008, Lu gained prominence in the early 1970s as an outspoken feminist and democrat and spent five years in jail in the last half of the 1970s for sedition. Building from Lu's public voice other social reform leaders emerged such as Lee Yuan-chen, the pioneering feminist of the 1980s and editor of the key feminist magazine Funü xinzhi (Awakenings). These are but two prominent examples of the myriad women leaders of the last century that Chang's volume discusses.
The book demonstrates that democratization is crucial to the vibrancy of antagonistic women's activism. While authoritarian governments can “bequeath” benefits to women, broad social change emerges from mobilization and consciousness-raising rather than the issuance of fiats. Autonomy of agenda formation and freedom from government intervention has been crucial to the rapid and sustained success of Taiwan's women's movement in the last 30 years. While gains were made under colonial and martial law governments, women activists were forced to alter their agendas to conform to the dictates of their rulers. Other times they simply adjusted their terminology – for example “professionalized public childcare” became “co-operative home economics” in the martial-law years. But, Chang's book shows us that the process of popularizing ideas about new ways of conceiving of family structures, or men and women's relationships, or sexuality is crucial to effecting broad-based, sustained social change. The successes of the feminist movement since the 1980s have grown from the expansion of support for the principle of women's equality with men among the Taiwanese population as a whole.
Drawing on extensive journal and newspaper reports for the earliest periods, and supplemented by interviews and personal observation for the more recent periods, Chang's book is an authoritative summary of a century of activism. Her bibliography is a comprehensive and very useful tool. In addition, Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan is written in an accessible style and assumes no prior knowledge of feminism or Taiwan's history from its readers. Each chapter includes a brief history of the major political events, prominent individuals and scholarly context for the detailed subject matter to follow. In each of these respects it is an excellent text for students of all levels and scholars seeking a solid summary of feminism in Taiwan and its engagement with the global women's movements. Chang's book will also be of considerable interest to scholars seeking insights into social and political change in Taiwan over the course of its transformation from Japanese colony to thriving democratic state.
