Befitting its subject, Louise Edwards's monograph on “Hundred Beauties” (baimei) albums of idealized women rendered by some of urban China's leading commercial illustrators is a lovely specimen of twenty-first-century scholarly publishing, with a striking matte-finish cover and abundant illustrations. The six albums on which Edwards focuses were published between 1913 and 1923. They collected almost nine hundred lithograph-printed images, produced as early as the 1870s, that initially adorned periodicals of the late Qing and the early Republic. In Citizens of Beauty, Edwards examines the ways in which these drawings reflected shifting notions of not just the ideal woman's body and behavior but also the moral underpinnings of gender and citizenship. Specifically, she argues that these images promoted a new model of democratic society in which citizens, including women, owed public duties not to the imperial dynasty but to a new Chinese nation.

According to Edwards, the new Hundred Beauties both reflected and contributed to efforts to separate a newly conceived modernity from the antiquated past (pp. 14–15). Instead of portraying “a decorated object that displayed the wealth of her household” (p. 101) or “a vehicle for conveying Confucian morality” (p. 50) like late imperial baimei, male artists who drew new beauties self-consciously showed them giving lectures, holding weapons, driving automobiles, running footraces, calling lovers on telephones, admiring their own bodies, and educating their children.

The first two chapters discuss depictions of women's hands and feet, respectively. Whether performing traditionally feminized tasks such as needlework or using newfangled tools such as typewriters, new beauties had “productive, active” (p. 44) hands, in contrast with the visually abstract or hidden hands of their late imperial counterparts. Edwards argues that these hands represented a new elevation of manual work and “the potential of the ‘serving classes’ from ordinary households to represent the beauty of individuality and autonomy” (p. 45). Likewise, fin-de-siècle beauties were always drawn with unbound feet as they enjoyed physical activity, unlike late imperial paragons, who, even when on horseback, were shown “seated passively” and traveling under the aegis of others (p. 85). As further testament to the new baimei's hardiness, autonomy, and “Everywoman” qualities, they were illustrated “battling the elements of [their] new national geography” (p. 97) by venturing forth in wind, rain, and cold in displays of “physicality, rather than ethereality” (p. 109), adventures that are the focus of chapter 3.

In the second half of the book, Edwards turns to more abstract meanings of baimei images. Chapter 4 considers beauties in the newly idealized nuclear family, “elevated as desirable figures through depictions of their daily chores” (p. 111) and their mothering of future citizens. Edwards notes that artists now placed the long-standing trope of women tending to households and children within the category of feminine beauty and, moreover, highlighted mother-child bonds, as opposed to the late imperial emphasis on baimei allegiances to husbands and parents-in-law. Chapter 5 considers modern beauties as symbols of a more democratic gender and sexual ethos. They actively participate in romantic relationships rather than exemplifying “boundless, chaste devotion to their men” (p. 136). Edwards further contends that, for the first time, female nudes could be presented “freed of the moral overtones of traditional femme fatale stories and pornography” (p. 153). Then, chapter 6 addresses the creation of a “horizontal community” of media consumers to which women themselves belonged, breaking with older hierarchal ideals (p. 156). Whereas traditional baimei often appeared entertaining their husbands, modern beauties were shown enjoying their own musical and artistic talents and even admiring their own nude forms. Per Edwards, this elision of the beauty's patriarchal “master” produced “new possibilities for a wider range of desiring citizens” (p. 171), including women admiring other women.

Citizens of Beauty adds to the field of early Republican cultural history by illuminating the degree to which novel ideals of gender and sexuality were present well before the Nanjing decade (1927–37). Edwards reminds us of how motifs that we take for granted today (a hand shown naturalistically gripping a hoe or bicycle handlebar) may have surprised a viewer a century earlier. Undeniably, the new baimei represented a crucial shift in the realm of imagined possibility, and the rich contents of these albums well merit careful study.

But Edwards's (understandable) desire to view these imagined women not as “naïve victim[s]” (p. 167) seems to have overwritten another possible reading: that these “democratic dreams” of modern femininity by male artists were premised on, and generated, both continuing and new conditions of hierarchy, exploitation, and injustice among real women in this era. Close readings of the pictures can tell us about new imagined possibilities and desires—at least among the men who created and most likely consumed these images. But what can they tell us about “ordinary” consumers unable to access periodicals, much less the full albums? Here, some investigation of the albums’ price point, where they were sold and advertised, how many copies were printed, how consumers, censors, and critics reacted to them, and whether older forms of Hundred Beauties were still widely circulated would have been useful.

Citizens of Beauty demonstrates the divergent standards between ourselves and historical actors for what was novel and transgressive when discussing the beauties’ hands and feet. Yet that awareness seems absent in regard to the eroticism of the baimei genre, whether late imperial or early Republican. The chapter featuring overtly sexualized, controversial nudes from the albums does not address the images and captions in other chapters, which would have also carried a charge for a reader/viewer across the fin de siècle. In one instance, Edwards glosses se as “beautiful appearance” (p. 33) when that word strongly connotes lust and eroticism. In some images that Edwards reads as empowering depictions of women citizens embodying hybridized modernity, I noted captions waxing poetic about “tender breasts” (suxiong, image 1.14) or alluding to sleeping lovers (shuangyuan, image 1.7).

Edwards does touch on some of these issues: she acknowledges that these pictures were commodities made and largely consumed by men, that they contained elements of voyeuristic pleasure, and that old-style Hundred Beauties continued to be produced concurrently (p. 39n99). All of these factors, though, surely suggest that modern baimei images cannot be straightforwardly interpreted as attesting to valorized democratic desire and female autonomy. In a way, Citizens of Beauty has replicated the same reification of tradition versus modernity and the privileging of the latter that Edwards identifies among late Qing and early Republic print brokers and political reformers.