In her study of Chinese women's history in the years between the late imperial Qing reforms of 1898 and the start of the Sino–Japanese War in 1937, Yuxin Ma examines the emergence and the significance of various feminist discourses as they were constructed by literate women in journalism. Using “gender as an analytical category to study major women's press writings in the years of nation building” (p. 3), Ma hopes to discover women's agency in order to “reveal Chinese women's multiple possibilities in modernity by investigating the flexible meanings of ‘nationalism’ and ‘feminism’” (p. 316).

The five chapters are organized chronologically and divided into “three continuous but distinctive stages” of the evolution of women's feminist discourses. By using this periodization, Ma attempts to reject the May Fourth paradigm that “trivializes the literary and cultural accomplishments of Chinese women” (p. 21). Chapter one addresses the initial stage from 1898 to the establishment of Republican China in 1911, in which the relations between women and the nation became central in feminist discourses. Ma argues that in this period Chinese women reformers appropriated Western liberal feminist ideas and the nationalist discourses promoted by male reformers, yet created an individualist version of womanhood in journalism, which challenged the male discourse on women as “good wives and wise mothers” (xian qi liang mu). Chapters two and three document the formative stage from 1911 to 1923, when the nationalist rhetoric of emancipation allowed literate women to form a discursive space against male domination. Chapter two concerns women suffragists in the early 1910s who employed a rhetoric of women's citizenship. In chapter three, Ma discusses the May Fourth women from 1915 to 1923 who employed liberal discourses of “human rights” and the “new woman” to legitimize women's presence in the “public sphere” and to advocate women's sharing of male power and women's role in modernizing China. According to Ma, in these two stages, nationalism provided the necessary rhetorical devices for a distinct women's feminism to emerge. At the same time, journalism was recognized as autonomous from male domination and as an objective space to represent the voices of the female majority. Ma characterizes the years from 1924 to 1937 as the mature stage, in which diverse feminist voices emerged, sometimes collaborating with nationalism and anti-state totalitarianism. Chapter four explores the emergence of professionalism during the National Revolution (1924–27) that enabled women journalists to overcome their ideological differences and respond to and co-operate with each other in their feminist writings and practices. Chapter five documents various discrepancies and collaborations between feminists from 1929 to 1937. These involved anti-Japanese nationalist sentiments and resistance to the Nationalist state ideology that manipulated male domination over women. For Ma, by introducing feminist discourses to their readers, women journalists themselves constituted a gendered Chinese “public sphere.”

Despite the fact that this book, as Ma acknowledges, is the first work in English to systematically study Chinese women's journals over the entire period of 1898–1937, the study still employs the same methodology as a number of other scholarly publications on China's “public sphere” and journalism. While “public sphere” as the evidence of China's modernity has been a debatable topic in China studies since the 1990s, the focus of this growing scholarship has recently shifted from visible urban spaces – such as parks, streets, teahouses and the court – to literary production and collective sentiments in China. In a sense, Ma's book intends to have dialogues with Lee Haiyan on the literary public sphere and Eugenia Lean on public sympathy. Two criticisms arise from Ma's methodology that links a gendered public sphere to modernity. First, it is not convincing that one could have identified a writer's gender simply from his/her name as it appeared in print or from the oppositional statements against the mainstream male discourses, especially when writers frequently used pseudonyms of the opposite gender in order to be more convincing or to avoid censorship. Second, using the “public sphere” as the measuring stick for evaluating China's modernity reduces the politics and the significance of these various feminisms to forms of resistance to imperialism, patriarchy and the state. Two important historical questions remain unexamined. What kinds of social transformations and structural crises in the contemporary world did they perceive in their discussions of women's everyday lives in journalism? What kind of future did they imagine as they advocated a form of internationalism based upon the unity of all women? For example, in chapter three, a historical analysis of why women feminists in the 1920s shifted their focus away from suffrage to the labour movement – the historical and structural problem of capitalist transition – is missing. Besides, as “labour” became a worldwide problem after the First World War and the Soviet Revolution in 1918, the global significance of Chinese feminist discourses on female labour and on an internationalism based on anti-exploitation is not historically or comparatively analysed. In a sense, Ma's study of Chinese women's history is still inscribed as the negation of the master narratives of Western-centricism, the nation-state and male-centricism.

Except with regard to “public spheres,” the book is part of a body of research on newspapers, books and periodicals in modern China. Historical writings no longer deal with the institutional development of the Chinese press. Instead, they choose a particular subject and focus on its forms of rhetorical devices, its readership or its political agenda, such as the works of Barbara Mittler (2004) and Weipin Tsai (2010) on Shenbao, and of Wen-hsin Yeh on Shenghuo zhoukan. Although Ma's study provides detailed information on each journal and on the institutionalization of China's journalism, the specific genre of the materials (news or editorial matter) analysed, and the various visual materials (drawings, cartoons, photographs, etc.) in the journals have not been discussed or theorized. Besides, in the analyses of the materials there is no explicit elaboration of why women writers chose journalism or of how they became different kinds of feminists compared to male feminists. In fact, using sexual difference to evaluate differences between individuals' choices, men's and women's culture, or the contradictions in politics is neither convincing nor historical.

A helpful guide to these problems that confront cultural historians can be found in the work of Benedict Anderson on print capitalism and nationalism, and of Christopher Reed on Chinese print capitalism, in which colonialism and capitalism became the motor of print culture and a form of politics to emerge. While for Reed, the Chinese constantly made conscious decisions on what they would adopt and reject when print capitalism was introduced by Euro-American entrepreneurs, Anderson argues that print capitalism fostered both the colonizers and the colonized to imagine nations as collective and collaborative communities.

Compared with other research on publications and their readerships, the strength of this book is that it documents surveys of women's journals and detailed exchanges between women journalists and their readers in the 1920s and 1930s. Overall, this book contributes to the field of modern Chinese history, culture and society. It will be a useful source to scholars and students of Chinese history, intellectual history, feminism and journalism.