Constitutions occupy a paradoxical place in modern Chinese history. They have been read as failed liberal imports, as authoritarian façades, and as transitional instruments under the Guomindang’s (KMT) doctrine of political tutelage.Footnote 1 Yet far less attention has been paid to how women participated in constitution-making and engaged constitutional discourse as a site of political struggle. This article argues that the constitutional history of Republican China (1912–1949) cannot be understood apart from feminist interventions. Women were not only the objects of constitutional regulation but also critics, petitioners, and reformers who sought to transform constitutional provisions into guarantees of gender equality.
The paradox of feminist constitutionalism in China was that it developed within a political framework that subordinated equality to nationalist imperatives. The KMT proclaimed citizen equality as a principle but at the same time located women’s rights within discourses of motherhood and reproductive duty. Feminists recognized these tensions and attempted to use them to their advantage. By appropriating official rhetoric of equality and protection, they pressed for concrete reforms including quotas for women’s representation, equal pay, maternity leave, childcare, and women’s property rights. Underlying these debates were two incompatible visions of constitutionalism itself. The Nationalist regime invoked the constitution to bring the revolution to a close, declaring equality already achieved and elevating civic obligation above claims-making. Feminists, however, treated constitution-making as a lever for change: a legal and political opening through which structural hierarchies could be challenged and the meaning of citizenship renegotiated on gendered terms.
Placing feminist actors at the center of constitutional history highlights several key points. First, women activists treated constitutions as political opportunities rather than abstract texts. Organizations such as the Women’s Constitutional Research Associations, created under KMT auspices in 1944, became forums where women debated drafts, proposed amendments, and critiqued the institutions through which constitutional governance operated. These discussions reveal that women demanded recognition not only as abstract citizens but also as political participants entitled to representation, labor rights, and property ownership.
Second, feminist critiques were fundamentally structural. Writers such as Liu Hengjing and Tan Tiwu identified how electoral cycles, legislative design, and land law perpetuated exclusion and gendered differentiation. In doing so, they shifted the analytical frame from “women’s clauses” to the architecture of constitutional governance itself, insisting that equal citizenship required institutional as well as textual reform.
Third, feminist constitutionalism in Republican China was both strategic and constrained—strategic in its appropriation of official discourse to expand the scope of constitutional rights, constrained by the persistence of maternalist framings that continued to define women’s citizenship through reproductive roles. These tensions reveal how gender operated not at the margins but at the conceptual core of Republican constitutionalism.
This approach speaks to three historiographies. First, studies of Chinese constitutionalism and political reform have emphasized party tutelage, sovereignty, and the adaptation of Western models but have rarely treated gender as constitutive rather than incidental.Footnote 2 By bringing constitutional history into dialogue with the history of science, especially the entanglement of eugenics, birth control, and reproductive governance,Footnote 3 this article shows how biopolitical concerns were written into constitutional discourse and how feminists contested these incursions by reframing reproduction as a site of rights and autonomy.
Second, the rich scholarship on women and citizenship in Republican China has highlighted activism in education, social reform, and the suffrage movement, yet the constitution as a site where feminist claims about reproduction and maternal rights were articulated, negotiated, and institutionalized remains understudied.Footnote 4 By foregrounding constitutional debates as arenas of feminist politics, this article integrates legal and gender history to show how women appropriated the state’s own language of equality and protection to demand substantive reform. Moreover, by engaging with recent scholarship on wartime women writers, this article highlights how women writers and activists continued to insist on women’s agency, professional competence, and self-definition even during moments of national crisis.Footnote 5 In doing so, they challenged state-sanctioned gender roles that confined women to sacrificial or supportive functions and instead claimed women as active political and social participants in the nation and the war effort, thereby using wartime mobilization itself as a basis for demanding rights.
Third, scholarship on popular constitutionalism has demonstrated that constitutional meaning emerges not only through courts and legislatures but also through the practices of ordinary people.Footnote 6 Larry Kramer’s distinction between popular and legal constitutionalism and Mark Tushnet’s institutional approach underscore that constitutional authority is shaped through social organizations and collective mobilization.Footnote 7 Building on these insights, this article positions Chinese women as constitutional actors whose engagement with reproduction, birth control, and family planning constituted a bottom-up reimagining of constitutional meaning. Their activism, ranging from birth control advocacy networks to women’s associations, transformed the boundaries between state and society and infused lived experience with constitutional significance beyond judicial recognition.
Comparative scholarship reinforces this perspective. Ross Dardani’s study of Guamanian constitutional claims under US naval rule and Lyle Cherneff’s recovery of freedwomen’s constitutional activism during Reconstruction both illustrate how marginalized groups created constitutional meaning through extrajudicial practices, challenging elite-centered accounts of constitutional development.Footnote 8 Like Guamanian petitioners and Reconstruction-era Black women, Chinese feminists used constitutional discourse to articulate political agency and negotiate inclusion within a patriarchal-nationalist regime. At the same time, they strategically adapted international models—from American and European suffrage debates to Soviet protections for working mothers—to articulate demands that were at once transnationally informed and locally situated. In this comparative frame, the Chinese case demonstrates that feminist constitutionalism was not derivative or peripheral but a crucial part of a broader global history in which subordinated actors reshaped constitutional culture from below.
Motherhood: A Duty or a Right?
Prior to the introduction of modern contraceptive methods, birth control had a long history in China. Women and households employed various traditional practices, including herbal contraceptives, withdrawal methods, prolonged breastfeeding, menstrual tracking, and superstitious practices, to limit the number of children and manage family size.Footnote 9 When these methods failed, people often turned to abortion to avoid having more children than they could support. However, methods of abortion could be invasive and self-injurious, carried significant health risks, and were not even effective.Footnote 10 In cases where unwanted pregnancies resulted in live births, infanticide became a means of controlling family size, particularly in contexts where female children were devalued due to socio-economic and cultural pressures.
Eugenics entered Chinese intellectual circles in the 1910s and gained broad attention after Margaret Sanger’s visit in 1922.Footnote 11 Following her visit, new birth control methods, including contraceptives such as cervical caps, spermicides, and condoms, as well as educational initiatives on family planning, were introduced. Supporters of eugenics through birth control argued that limiting births would ease women’s burdens, combat overpopulation, and improve national health by cultivating stronger and healthier citizens.Footnote 12 Intellectuals such as Zhang Jingsheng, Sun Benwen, and especially Pan Guangdan later provided a more systematic translation and dissemination of eugenic ideas.Footnote 13
Pan, trained in the United States under Charles Davenport, was profoundly influenced by Social Darwinism and the eugenic practices in America. After returning to China in 1926, he taught at Tsinghua University and became one of China’s most influential advocates of eugenics.Footnote 14 Across his writings, Pan expressed a deep anxiety over China’s position in global racial competition. He viewed eugenics—grounded in heredity and selective reproduction—as a scientific solution to national weakness.Footnote 15
For Pan, natural selection dictated that differentiation and inequality were inherent to human society, so the task of eugenics was to cultivate “fit” citizens while discouraging reproduction among those he deemed “unfit.” Pan extended this logic to gender. He argued that women’s primary vocation was motherhood, grounded in their biological capacities, and that feminists’ attempts to equalize genders threatened to destabilize the family structure and undermine social harmony.Footnote 16
His insistence that women’s political aspirations must yield to their reproductive responsibilities shaped many debates within the women’s movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Not all feminists rejected Pan’s framework outright. Some embraced aspects of his argument, contending that motherhood could be understood as a civic contribution deserving recognition within the expanding definition of citizenship. These feminists attempted to make room for domestic labor within political discourse, arguing that if women were responsible for producing the next generation of citizens, their social status should reflect this indispensable role.Footnote 17
Yet evolutionary thought and eugenic theory also produced internal tensions within feminist discourse. The notion of maternal and child welfare (baoyu) was often framed through an evolutionary logic that emphasized children’s rights and the future vitality of the nation, reinforcing women’s responsibilities as mothers and guardians of national progress. By contrast, the emerging birth control movement focused on the physical, economic, and emotional burdens repeatedly borne by women. Feminist advocates argued that frequent childbirth damaged women’s health, deepened household poverty, and limited women’s opportunities for education, employment, and civic participation. Thus, while both discourses invoked scientific authority and national strength, they differed over whether reproduction primarily served the nation or women themselves.
Some feminists strategically merged nationalist rhetoric with calls for bodily autonomy: by preventing excessive reproduction, women protected both their personal well-being and the health of the nation. They argued that if the state entrusted women with producing capable future citizens, then women must also have the political and social rights necessary to shape the conditions under which they lived and reproduced. Put simply, if motherhood was framed as a national duty, women had the right to demand institutional reforms and autonomy over its fulfillment.Footnote 18
Sanger’s visit accelerated the institutionalization of these debates. Throughout the 1930s, birth control clinics and research societies appeared in major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing. Staffed largely by female doctors, these clinics offered contraceptive education and services to married women. As birth control became embedded within medical and bureaucratic systems, it was shaped by both eugenic rationales and feminist visions of autonomy. The Beiping Committee on Maternal Health (1930–1937), initiated by obstetrician Yang Chongrui and joined by physicians from Peking Union Medical College, including John B. Grant, Wang Yihui, Li Dingan, and Fang Yiji, illustrates these tensions.Footnote 19
Under clinic regulations, only married women who met certain hardship criteria (frequent childbirth, financial strain, poor health, hereditary disease) were eligible for contraceptive services. Birth control thus became conditional: a woman needed both institutional approval and her husband’s consent. These rules reflected a broader assumption that reproductive decisions lay within the purview of marriage and the household, not with the woman herself.Footnote 20
The clinic’s procedures were elaborate. After an initial inquiry or referral, women underwent an interview to document family circumstances. Social workers conducted home visits, and female doctors performed medical examinations to determine appropriate contraceptive methods. Follow-up consultations ensured continued supervision. This multilayered process, although designed to ensure public health and medical oversight, reinforced institutional authority over women’s bodies.Footnote 21
A case reported by West Wind illustrates how these procedures played out in practice. A thirty-three-year-old woman, married at seventeen through parental arrangement, arrived at a Shanghai clinic seeking birth control after years of almost annual pregnancies. Financial strain, exhaustion, and dangerous attempts at self-induced abortion had driven her to seek help: “I gave birth to a child almost every year, my third and fourth kids came in one year. I am pregnant again this year and I am so stressed since we cannot afford another kid. I hid from my parents-in-law and took some medicine, which made me bleed and almost killed me. I went to a maternal hospital and a young lady referred me here, saying I won’t get pregnant after the treatment and there is no danger. Doctor, can you really help me stop having children?”Footnote 22
The female doctor listened sympathetically and assured her that contraception was possible, but only with her husband’s consent. The woman confessed that her family did not know she had come. Ultimately, she brought her husband to the clinic, where he expressed their shared desire to limit births despite pressure from his parents for more children. Only after securing his approval did the doctor proceed with the treatment. This episode of the husband’s right to have the final say over women’s reproductive choices reflected a distinctly modern development. It effectively marginalizes the older generation while elevating the conjugal bond of the modern nuclear family. In this configuration, authority over reproduction is relocated from the extended or stem-family hierarchy to the husband–wife unit, granting new forms of autonomy and decision-making power to the marital couple in ways that earlier kinship structures did not permit.
The journalist’s narrative highlighted the tension between personal suffering, social norms, and female agency in early birth control efforts. Female doctors often displayed compassion yet remained bound by institutional rules that positioned husbands as arbiters of women’s reproductive choices. The clinic functioned simultaneously as caretaker and gatekeeper: it provided relief from the physical and economic burdens of repeated pregnancies while underscoring the constrained nature of women’s reproductive autonomy in the 1930s.
Despite these constraints, birth control clinics became sites of cultural transformation. The presence of journalists such as the West Wind reporter signaled a growing effort to shift reproductive suffering from the private realm into public discourse. By presenting individual cases, the press humanized structural issues and challenged the silence surrounding women’s reproductive labor. Clinics also worked to counter class-based disparities. Although critics argued that contraception primarily benefited elite women, clinic records indicated increasing participation among laborers, the unemployed, and impoverished women.Footnote 23 Female doctors such as Shen Jiying developed low-cost contraceptive powders and offered services at minimal fees to make contraception accessible to working-class patients.Footnote 24 Reports from Shen’s Peking clinic noted that although early users tended to be middle class, by the mid-1930s, a substantial number of laborers, unemployed individuals, and impoverished lower-class women also sought contraception.Footnote 25 The report highlighted a clear upward trend in working-class participation in birth control programs, suggesting that the movement was gradually expanding beyond the educated elite and gaining traction among broader segments of society.Footnote 26 Economic realities intensified feminist arguments for birth control. Many women pointed out that a husband’s income often barely covered basic necessities, making large families unsustainable. In such circumstances, contraception was essential not merely for individual autonomy but for household survival and the raising of healthier children.Footnote 27
In sharp contrast to these grassroots developments, the Nationalist state moved in the opposite direction; the KMT Fifth Central Committee’s Eighth Plenary Session passed a 1941 resolution, built on a 1939 proposal, calling for “encouraging childbirth, promoting eugenics, strengthening the nation, and consolidating the foundation of the state.”Footnote 28 Feminists within the party such as Liu Hengjing forcefully opposed this state-imposed obligation of motherhood. Liu argued that uncontrolled childbirth was neither sustainable nor beneficial for women or the nation. High infant mortality and deteriorating maternal health, she contended, restricted women’s ability to contribute to public life. Instead of pressuring women to bear more children, the state should prioritize scientific childcare, healthcare improvement, and better living conditions.Footnote 29
Liu explicitly linked women’s emancipation to reproductive autonomy: without control over their bodies, equality was impossible. She also warned that women’s sacrifices for nationalist goals would be unrecognized: “The nation will not be grateful for your sacrifice, society will not forgive you for reduced work efficiency, your husband will not sympathize with your aging due to frequent childbirth, and no one will pity you for the shortened life span it causes. Since the nation cannot alleviate the suffering of these women, women must save themselves. The only way to self-preservation is through birth control.”Footnote 30 By rejecting the notion that women’s reproductive labor should serve national goals, Liu placed reproductive autonomy at the center of women’s rights.Footnote 31
Similar critiques appeared in writer Zhang Jing’s response to Pan Guangdan’s claim that women’s pursuit of education and political engagement caused them to neglect their “innate” maternal duties.Footnote 32 Zhang argued that such accusations ignored material realities: power and resources remained controlled by men, and women seeking economic or political participation faced pervasive structural barriers.Footnote 33 Confronting wartime slogans of “national survival,” she insisted on women’s bodily autonomy and refused the idea that women should sacrifice personal development for national health. She asked, “How can the nation’s so-called ‘health’ be advanced by sacrificing women’s rightful liberation and development?” and argued that national well-being required comprehensive social planning, not reliance on women’s reproductive labor alone.Footnote 34 More broadly, she insisted that women should be allowed to fulfill the “duties of humanity,” thereby rejecting Pan’s conflation of womanhood with motherhood.
Although Pan consistently advocated eugenics, his position on birth control remained ambivalent. He encouraged “elite” women, particularly the educated, to have more children while urging “inferior” groups to refrain from reproduction.Footnote 35 Zhang, by contrast, framed birth control as a tool of economic and personal liberation, not demographic engineering.
This debate reveals a recurring phenomenon from the 1920s to the 1940s: female intellectuals, medical professionals, and ordinary married women tended to prioritize birth control, while male intellectuals focused more on eugenics. For feminists, reproductive autonomy was central to women’s rights; for male thinkers and state planners, reproduction served the nation. This divergence reflected a broader tension between feminist advocacy and state-driven biopolitics, in which women’s bodies became increasingly central to wartime narratives of national survival.
This gendered divide was materially enacted in birth control clinics. Although these clinics still operated within prevailing norms—often acknowledging male authority within marriage—they also became spaces where women’s reproductive suffering could be articulated, recognized, and shared. In this setting, women developed informal networks of support that extended beyond clinical encounters, facilitating collective articulation of reproductive sacrifice and enabling subsequent petitions to the Nationalist state.
More broadly, the discourse on birth control exposed a fundamental struggle over the meaning of reproductive labor, bodily autonomy, and the gendered foundations of citizenship. Within feminist thought, it sharpened a key dilemma: whether to strategically frame motherhood as a national duty in order to secure rights and protections or to redefine motherhood as a voluntary and contingent choice. The latter position not only challenged dominant nationalist assumptions but also exceeded the modern state’s prevailing biopolitical imagination of reproduction as a resource to be managed for national strength.
Gender Equality and Its Limits
In 1941, Zhu Jiahua, head of the Organization Department of the KMT, addressed a training session for Nationalist women cadres and declared that “gender equality” had been a guiding principle of the Nationalist Revolution from the beginning.Footnote 36 With the 1931 Provisional Constitution of the Tutelage Period and the new civil and criminal codes, he claimed, legal inequality between men and women had already been consigned to history.Footnote 37 Unlike Western women, who had to fight men for suffrage and equal rights, Chinese women, he insisted, had received citizenship effortlessly through the benevolence of the Nationalist revolution. Under this logic, equality was no longer something to be demanded but a gift bestowed by the party-state, one that required loyalty and gratitude in return. The women’s movement, Zhu argued, had never been about conflict between the sexes; it aimed instead to enable women to fulfill national duties alongside men.Footnote 38 “Equality” thus appeared less as a language of rights than of obligations, strengthening the nation, preserving the race, and bearing the burden of national survival.
Zhu’s narrative expressed the KMT’s official view of the women’s movement, but it distorted historical realities. Chinese women had not passively benefited from the revolution; they had participated actively in late-Qing uprisings, early Republican student movements, and the broader Nationalist revolution. Zhu’s rhetoric erased this history and recast the KMT as the primary benefactor of women’s rights. Once the phrase “gender equality” appeared in constitutional texts, the Nationalist government used it as a slogan to project progressiveness at home and abroad, transforming equality into a tool for legitimizing state power rather than recognizing women’s autonomy or political agency.
The constitutional principle of equality also served diplomatic purposes. In 1934, Suzanne Grinberg, a leading French feminist and chair of the Committee on the Civil Status of Women in the International Alliance of Women, requested information from the KMT government on women’s rights in China.Footnote 39 The Nationalist government seized the opportunity to showcase its modernity. Premier Wang Jingwei instructed officials to cite Article 6 of the 1931 Provisional Constitution and Article 8 of KMT jurist John C.H. Wu’s draft constitution,Footnote 40 which stated that “all citizens of the Republic of China shall be equal before the law,” as evidence that equality was legally guaranteed.Footnote 41 Yet the provision made no explicit reference to gender.Footnote 42 The gap between formal constitutional language and women’s lived realities was obvious to feminist observers.
Journalist Ji Hong, writing in Women’s Life, noted that aside from Article 124—which vaguely mandated special protection for women and children in labor—there was no clause specifically addressing women in Wu’s entire draft.Footnote 43 Even if the equality article were intended to encompass gender, she argued, the deeply entrenched political, economic, and cultural disadvantages faced by women required explicit constitutional recognition. Ji called for concrete guarantees of equal rights in education, employment, and pay, as well as state responsibility for maternity hospitals, childcare centers, and kindergartens to relieve women’s domestic burdens. These proposals, she stressed, were essential not only for women’s welfare but also for the healthy development of future citizens.Footnote 44
Ji’s critique exemplified a common feminist strategy: turning a general principle of equality into a detailed blueprint of specific rights and corresponding state obligations. She emphasized the reciprocal relationship between women and the state—if women were expected to bear and raise citizens, the state owed them institutional support. By linking women’s rights to maternal and child welfare, she redefined citizenship to include gender-specific rights and insisted that meaningful equality required substantive legal protections and social infrastructure, not mere declaratory clauses. At the same time, Ji Hong’s argument followed the prevalent paradigm in the Republican era that placed obligations before rights: citizens were expected to fulfill duties to the nation before claiming legal entitlements.
By grounding women’s rights in maternal responsibility, Ji reframed citizenship but still operated within a rights-after-duties paradigm that limited feminist claims. For Liu Hengjing and others, this framework was no longer sufficient. As early as 1936, Liu argued that only explicit recognition of “equality between women and men” could bridge the growing gap between legal principle and lived inequality, and that symbolic equality required institutional mechanisms to be meaningful.Footnote 45 Although Liu accepted the KMT’s official position that the legal framework had already guaranteed gender equality and women’s rights, she emphasized the disjuncture between policy and practice. On paper, gender equality may have been affirmed, but in lived reality, its impact remained limited and uneven.Footnote 46
Liu therefore proposed gender quotas in both local and occupational elections. Without such guarantees, she argued, women would remain systematically excluded from politics. She described prewar constitutionalism as “men’s constitutional government”; the National Assembly was effectively a one-gender institution.”Footnote 47 In many rural areas, she observed, the word “people” in election laws was widely understood to mean only men. The idea that “women are also people” was so novel that even women often overlooked their own political rights, resulting in low voter turnout and limited female candidacy.Footnote 48
For Liu and many other feminists, constitution-making was more than a legal process; it was a rare political opening with the potential to reshape social norms. They saw the constitution as a vehicle for institutionalizing feminist claims and advancing a broader vision of gender equality across law, culture, and political life. Their critiques and proposals revealed a sophisticated grasp of the KMT’s agendas and a determination to turn the language of equality, deployed by the regime as propaganda, into a substantive program for transforming citizenship itself.
Still, a more radical feminist critique emerged that rejected the foundational assumption that rights derive from duty. Journalist Shen Zijiu captured this inversion powerfully in her 1937 open letter to the National Women’s Representative Assembly: “To fulfill obligations, we must secure our rights first.”Footnote 49 Shen insisted on clearly enumerated rights in the constitution. Responding to those who argued that pressing for rights was inappropriate amid looming war, she maintained that women had to demand constitutional guarantees, especially the right to participate in making the constitution and other laws, if they were ever to perform meaningful civic duties.Footnote 50 She called for a provision explicitly declaring equality between men and women in legal, economic, educational, and social spheres, alongside specific clauses protecting motherhood.Footnote 51 Only with such concrete protections, she argued, could women truly contribute to national development.
Shen’s position offered an important feminist counterpoint to nationalist logic. By insisting that rights were the precondition for obligations, she articulated a theory of citizenship in which the state had responsibilities toward women, whose participation depended on access to constitutionally secured rights. This redefined the citizen–state relationship as reciprocal rather than unilateral and challenged the state’s attempt to instrumentalize women in the name of national survival.
Women’s organizations echoed these demands. The Shanghai Women’s Association, for instance, issued statements asserting that only women could truly represent women’s interests; only they understood their own suffering, and only through their efforts could such suffering be alleviated. Therefore, constitutional obligations imposed on women would be legitimate only if women themselves took part in drafting them.Footnote 52 Feminist constitutional activism thus positioned women as independent constitutional actors whose demands derived from lived experience.
In fact, early drafts of John Wu’s May Fifth Constitution in 1933 explicitly affirmed gender equality: “Citizens of the Republic of China shall be equal before the law, without distinctions based on gender, race, religion, class, or occupation.”Footnote 53 Feminist journals such as Women’s Resonance welcomed this clause.Footnote 54 Yet during revisions in 1934, the phrase “without distinctions based on gender” was removed, leaving only a generic declaration of equality.Footnote 55 Protections for female labor, which Wu had included from the beginning, remained in place, but his primary motivation was to preserve national strength by safeguarding women’s bodies as future mothers rather than to advance women’s rights per se. Gender equality thus became subordinated to nationalist and eugenic concerns: women’s labor protections served racial health more than feminist emancipation.Footnote 56
By 1940, women’s organizations had significantly advanced their reflections on the May Fifth Constitution Draft, particularly focusing on how substantive equality could be realized through constitutional reform. Hu Zhuoying recorded discussions from a women’s constitutional seminar held in Chongqing, where representatives demanded that key articles on equality, political rights, and education explicitly include the phrase “without gender discrimination.”Footnote 57 Aware that electoral structures disadvantaged women, they also called for guaranteed quotas for women among occupational representatives to the National Constituent Assembly. Since regional elections were deeply entangled with kinship and clan networks that favored male candidates, they suggested that occupational representation was a more accessible entry point for women into politics.
Hu and other participants also argued that Article 124 should be rewritten to guarantee equal pay for equal work and women’s right to enter all occupations and public offices. For working-class women, they stressed, economic rights were as important as political rights. Under the rubric of protecting women’s labor, they demanded formal recognition of maternal protection: paid prenatal and postpartum leave and rest days during menstruation.Footnote 58 Hu acknowledged that these proposals were inspired by the Soviet Constitution, which treated maternity benefits as basic rights. Because women bore a “dual responsibility”—participating in public labor while also shouldering reproductive and child-rearing duties—she argued they should receive “double rights” and protections from the state.Footnote 59
These debates show that women’s groups treated constitutional law not as symbolic recognition but as a practical instrument for dismantling entrenched inequalities. By advocating clearly enumerated rights and protections, they sought to transform social norms and improve everyday life. Feminist constitutional advocacy thus aimed to move beyond abstract statements of equality toward enforceable legal provisions that could challenge gendered hierarchies in both family and nation.
The KMT, however, insisted that its existing framework already sufficed. Party supporters claimed that early KMT women’s policies and the May Fifth Draft adequately protected women because gender inequality impeded “social evolution.”Footnote 60 Since the constitution avoided explicit gender distinctions, they argued, the term “citizen” automatically included women; the real issue was not legal status but women’s lack of training for political life.Footnote 61 When women demanded stronger economic and occupational protections, KMT commentators responded that the constitution should reflect basic realities rather than attempt to remake society.Footnote 62 If women wanted greater economic independence, they were told, they must first fulfill their primary roles in serving society and supporting the war effort. Having already “benevolently” granted equality in law, the state shifted responsibility onto women, asking them how they would accept this gift and fulfill their duties.Footnote 63
This interpretation that equality was an accomplished fact pervaded party discourse in the 1940s.Footnote 64 Zhu Jiahua criticized earlier women’s movements for overemphasizing political agitation at the expense of domestic life. He proposed that domesticity itself be redefined as public and national, so that “serving the family is serving the nation.”Footnote 65 By collapsing the distinction between private and public, this rhetoric revalidated traditional gender roles. Domestic labor was not recognized as a site of inequality but was glorified as patriotic service. In effect, feminist demands for rights were retranslated into the language of duty, sacrifice, and obedience to the state.
Soong Mei-ling, Chiang Kai-shek’s wife and a central figure in the New Life Movement and the Women’s Advisory Committee, reinforced this logic.Footnote 66 In a 1941 article, she argued that the Chinese women’s movement should not focus on “demanding equal rights from the state,” because equality was already “clearly stipulated” in law.Footnote 67 The true mission of Chinese women, she claimed, was national service, not individual freedom or liberation—goals she dismissed as outdated European feminism. Incorporating this position into the broader logic of the regime, we see a consistent ideological pattern: while affirming legal equality rhetorically, the regime simultaneously foreclosed its practical realization. Here, legal equality functioned as a ceiling rather than a floor: once the constitution declared citizens equal, further feminist claims appeared unnecessary or even selfish, and the burden of change shifted from institutions to individual women.
Feminists, however, did not simply reject KMT initiatives; they strategically engaged with them to redirect constitutional design toward women’s rights. They analyzed provisions that seemed gender-neutral but, in practice, disadvantaged women. Writer Xiang Yunxiu, for example, focused on Article 30 of the May Fifth Draft, which provided that National Assembly representatives serve six-year terms. Because women often had shorter careers due to family responsibilities, Xiang argued, long intervals between elections would sideline capable female candidates.Footnote 68 If a woman lost one election, her circumstances might change so much within six years that she could no longer run again, wasting her potential. To mitigate this risk, Xiang advocated for more robust organizational efforts among women representatives. She urged them to maintain strong ties with the broader female electorate to secure greater representation in subsequent National Assembly elections.
Xiang also proposed structural reforms to the National Assembly itself. Rather than being convened every six years solely by presidential decree, she argued, the Assembly should meet every three years and be empowered to call emergency sessions if more than two-fifths of its members so requested, without needing presidential approval. On the surface, this suggestion addressed women’s continuity in politics, but it also constituted a broader critique of Chiang Kai-shek’s concentration of power. Under the May Fifth scheme, the Assembly risked becoming a ceremonial body under executive control. Xiang’s proposal envisioned a more participatory and accountable constitutional order, in which legislative institutions could act as checks on executive authority.
In parallel, Xiang encouraged women activists to take advantage of the KMT’s local self-government principles to expand their participation in county-level politics.Footnote 69 She highlighted the connections between women’s engagement in community services—such as health, education, elder care, and childcare—and their capacity to enter public life. Her strategy complemented arguments recorded by Hu Zhuoying, where many women saw occupational representation as a practical route into politics. While women discussants in Hu’s record favored occupational representation as a strategic bypass, Xiang saw opportunity within the local governance framework itself, underscoring that proximity to community work could enhance women’s political participation.
Xiang Yunxiu’s structural critique of the National Assembly underscored a feminist awareness of how constitutional mechanisms could either impede or facilitate meaningful political participation. Her proposals to reform the Assembly’s operational structure reflected a sophisticated understanding that women’s rights were intrinsically linked to broader questions of governance and accountability. At the conclusion of her article, Xiang insisted that women’s participation should not be measured solely by the symbolic inclusion of a few female representatives. “We hope,” she wrote, “that in the future, women will make up more than one-third of the National Assembly.”Footnote 70
Gendered Citizenship and Governance of Maternal Duty
As women reformers attempted to translate constitutional ideals into social transformation, the discourse of “national regeneration” in Republican China was increasingly defined in biological rather than civic terms. By the early 1930s, the KMT Party appropriated the language of social improvement long used by feminists for equality and redirected it toward population quality and racial fitness.Footnote 71 Party propaganda framed national strength as dependent on racial regeneration and the cultivation of superior youth and emphasized that women’s education should prioritize “nurturing strong and compassionate motherhood” as a strategy for national salvation. This reframing firmly embedded eugenic ideology in state policy.Footnote 72
Although, as Yuehtsen Chung notes, Pan Guangdan’s proposals did not immediately yield formal eugenic legislation, Pan himself openly advocated legal measures to regulate reproduction.Footnote 73 He supported government intervention to promote the fertility of the “fit” and discourage, or even prohibit, the reproduction of those deemed biologically inferior. In 1931, Pan recommended marriage bans for individuals classified as “feeble-minded” and later suggested state-sponsored segregation, forced sterilization, and welfare programs designed to prevent “unfit” reproduction.Footnote 74
The eugenic logic also shaped his understanding of marriage. For Pan, marriage was not a private contract but a mechanism of national biological engineering and therefore subject to state oversight.Footnote 75 Reproductive choices, he argued, had direct implications for national vitality. This position justified state intervention in marital regulations and prepared the ground for constitutional provisions affecting marriage and reproduction.Footnote 76
John Wu, principal architect of the May Fifth constitutional draft, played a key role in institutionalizing this framework. Drawing on American precedents—particularly eugenic marriage laws across US states and the 1927 Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell, authored by his mentor Oliver Wendell Holmes—Wu incorporated eugenics directly into his 1933 draft.Footnote 77 In the draft’s chapter on nationalism, he declared that marriage was foundational to “national regeneration” and that individuals with mental illness or hereditary disease should be legally barred from marriage or reproduction.Footnote 78 The placement of this clause under “nationalism,” not rights, reflected the belief that marriage existed for national rather than individual purposes and that reproductive regulation was a legitimate expression of sovereign power.
Some feminists initially interpreted these proposals as potential protections against arranged marriage, yet they quickly recognized the deeper political stakes. They argued that regulation of marriage belonged in the realm of individual rights, not nationalist imperatives.Footnote 79 Their critiques challenged state efforts to repurpose marriage law for population management. Perhaps in response to such controversy, as well as sustained debate within the drafting process, the 1933 constitutional draft authored by John Wu underwent substantial revision. By the time it was officially promulgated in May 1936, the final version had abandoned much of its original nationalist rhetoric and removed earlier provisions that regulated marriage.
Nevertheless, the KMT continued to advance eugenic goals through a series of legislative proposals in the 1930s and 1940s, including the 1941 Proposal on Encouraging Birth and Promoting Eugenics, the 1944 Proposal for a Population Policy, and the 1945 Outline of National Policies of Maternal and Child Welfare.Footnote 80 These documents endorsed premarital examinations and marital restrictions for people with hereditary disease, embedding eugenics in the institutional apparatus of governance.Footnote 81
Because maternal and child welfare increasingly occupied the center of state policy, feminists adopted these themes to press for broader reforms. In the years preceding the 1946 National Constituent Assembly, feminist constitutional arguments converged with reproductive and welfare discourses. Discussions about motherhood and childcare greatly expanded the meaning of female citizenship and provided a platform from which women could claim political representation not merely as individuals but as a gendered collective with particular social and national responsibilities.
In 1944, the KMT organized Women’s Constitutional Research Associations across multiple provinces to promote party ideology among educated women.Footnote 82 Yet the associations soon developed critical perspectives of their own.Footnote 83 A meeting summary from the Guangxi branch of the Three People’s Principles Youth League revealed broad dissatisfaction with John Wu’s May Fifth Constitution Draft.Footnote 84 Participants criticized its protections for women as vague and symbolic and questioned why Article 5 explicitly named equality for ethnic groups but not for gender.Footnote 85 Further, they advocated for guaranteed quotas for women representatives in all levels of government, proposing that each province should have no fewer than one female delegate, so that the voices and interests of women nationwide could be meaningfully represented.
The discussants also advanced concrete proposals: equal pay, professional equality, and maternity protections, including two months of paid leave before and after childbirth. They identified Article 124 as particularly hollow, arguing that without childcare facilities and institutional support, women workers remained doubly burdened.Footnote 86 Importantly, they also pointed out gender inequality hidden within supposedly neutral constitutional clauses. Article 117 declared that all land belonged to “the citizenry,” yet customary practices systematically excluded women from inheritance. The activists called for explicitly stating that land belonged equally to “male and female citizens,” reframing not only legal definitions but also the material basis of women’s citizenship. This intervention tied constitutional reform to economic justice and the redistribution of property and power.Footnote 87
During the 1946 National Constituent Assembly, feminist activists continued to advocate for guaranteed representation for women in political office. Feminist writer Tan Tiwu argued that centuries of patriarchal custom made it impossible for women to exercise equal rights, so the constitution-in-the-making must transcend its contemporary context and actively seek to reform traditional norms and social practices.Footnote 88 She asserted that simply granting women the legal status of “citizens” in the constitution would be insufficient to ensure their rights. She proposed a separate chapter on women’s rights, covering political equality, quota systems, equal pay, maternity leave, and state-sponsored childcare.Footnote 89
Like Hu Zhuoying, Tan Tiwu noted that these proposals concerning the protection of women’s labor rights and motherhood were inspired by the Soviet Constitution.Footnote 90 Although Tan was a member of the Young China Party, which upheld nationalist statism and had historically maintained a sharply different ideological stance from communism, her endorsement of the Soviet model suggested that socialist models of gender rights transcended ideological boundaries within China’s multiparty landscape.Footnote 91
This socialist influence also shaped Liu Hengjing’s arguments for women’s representative quotas in the 1947 Constitution. Drawing on Sun Yat-sen’s principle of regulating capital, Liu emphasized that structural inequalities made laissez-faire equality impossible.Footnote 92 Without targeted interventions, she argued, “free competition” would simply reproduce existing hierarchies. Liu and Tan—despite belonging to different political parties—both articulated a feminist critique of structural oppression on women, linking broader struggles over economic justice to gender equality.
The final 1947 Constitution incorporated many feminist demands. Article 7 declared equality regardless of gender. Articles 26, 64, and 134 stated that a fixed number of seats shall be reserved for women in the National Assembly, Legislative Yuan, and local governments. Article 153 mandated labor protection for women and children, and Article 156 required the state to protect motherhood and promote women’s and children’s welfare.Footnote 93 These gains reflected sustained feminist mobilization: before and during the sessions of the 1946 National Constituent Assembly, women delegates wrote to Chiang Kai-shek, requesting an increase in women’s representation based on the significant contributions women had made during the war.Footnote 94 For example, female representatives such as Pi Yishu and Zhang Bangzhen petitioned Chiang to secure at least a 20% minimum quota for women’s election to representative bodies in the constitution.Footnote 95 Although this proposal was discussed during the Constituent Assembly, it was ultimately rejected by Chiang, who chose instead to adopt ambiguous language regarding women’s representation quotas in the constitution and deferred detailed stipulations to subsequent legislation.Footnote 96
It was not until the enactment of the “Election and Recall Act of National Assembly Representatives” (Guomin dahui daibiao xuanju bamian fa) and the “Election and Recall Act for Legislative Yuan Representatives” (Lifa yuan lifa weiyuan xuanju bamian fa) in March 1947 that explicit provisions were established, including a minimum quota of 168 seats for women in the National Assembly and a minimum quota of 10% for women elected through regional elections in the Legislative Yuan, with separate vote counting.Footnote 97
Motherhood became both a resource and a constraint within this political landscape. Feminist groups used the state’s emphasis on maternal duty to argue for labor rights, political participation, and welfare protections. Motherhood served as a unifying identity capable of mobilizing women across classes and regions. Yet tying women’s citizenship so closely to motherhood also enabled the state to regulate women’s reproductive bodies more directly. Pro-natalist policy, anti-abortion laws, and eugenic discourse limited the possibility of genuine reproductive autonomy. The emphasis on motherhood perpetuated an expectation that all female citizens would inevitably become mothers, implicitly excluding women who chose not to have children or rejected motherhood altogether from constitutional protection. Although the Nationalist government did not explicitly prohibit contraception, its strict anti-abortion laws and pro-natalist policies prevented feminists’ fight for reproductive rights after the constitution’s adoption in 1947.Footnote 98
These tensions became even more pronounced in Taiwan after 1949, where the 1947 Constitution was eventually implemented. Postwar policies continued to privilege maternal protection while regulating women’s reproductive choices. The emphasis on protecting maternal health laid the groundwork for various labor and health policies related to women. The 1974 Occupational Safety and Health Act required employers to adjust or reassign postpartum women working in environments deemed hazardous to maternal health.Footnote 99 While framed as a protective measure, such policies also reinforced traditional gender roles and potentially limited women’s professional opportunities. Moreover, these provisions increased the cost of employing female workers in certain industries and institutionalized the assumption that all women would eventually become mothers whose fertility must be protected by the state.Footnote 100
Similarly, laws regulating contraception and abortion reveal enduring continuities with Republican-era eugenics. The Genetic Health Act, most recently amended in 2009, retains clauses requiring spousal consent for abortion or sterilization unless specific exceptions apply.Footnote 101 These provisions treat reproduction as a matter of family governance rather than individual autonomy. Feminist advocates in Taiwan have repeatedly called for reform, but the legacy of the early twentieth century continues to define “family planning” as a collective duty shaped by paternal authority and state oversight.Footnote 102
Across these decades, the governance of reproduction and motherhood reveals the complex interplay between feminist mobilization and state biopolitics. Feminists engaged with constitutionalism creatively, leveraging maternalist discourse to expand rights even as the state appropriated the same discourse to regulate women’s bodies. The result was a gendered vision of citizenship that opened new avenues for political participation while simultaneously embedding patriarchal and eugenic assumptions into the constitutional order. Women reformers succeeded in institutionalizing important rights, yet their gains were constrained by a framework that continued to define motherhood as a duty to the nation and reproductive autonomy as conditional rather than absolute.
Conclusion
This study of women’s reproductive activism in Republican China illuminates a distinctive form of bottom-up engagement with constitutionalism. As in Guam or among freedwomen in Reconstruction-era Maryland, Chinese feminists approached constitutions not merely as abstract charters of state sovereignty but as arenas in which the boundaries of citizenship could be renegotiated through lived experience. Yet, unlike debates elsewhere that centered primarily on political inclusion or familial autonomy, Chinese feminist constitutionalism unfolded at the intersection of gender equality, reproductive autonomy, and the expanding authority of the revolutionary party. Campaigns for birth control, maternal health, and eugenic reform expanded women’s capacity to make claims about their own reproductive lives, thereby creating new grounds on which women could negotiate their rights, duties, and citizenship within the modern nation-state.
Placed together, these developments reveal that popular constitutionalism was a field of competing appropriations—one in which marginalized groups forged collective identities even as state authorities sought to reabsorb their claims into narratives of tutelage, patriarchy, and national regeneration. In Republican China, this struggle was particularly vivid because the constitution itself was understood in two sharply divergent ways. For the Nationalist Party, the constitution signified the end of revolution: a capstone that codified the achievements of party rule, affirmed that equality had already been granted, and transformed constitutionalism into a vehicle for political consolidation. Feminists, by contrast, treated constitution-making as a beginning, a rare legal opening through which enduring hierarchies could be challenged and new rights institutionalized. Where the state sought closure, feminist activists sought possibility.
It was through this latter vision that feminists produced a distinctly gendered political subjectivity. Through birth control clinics, Women’s Constitutional Research Associations, proposals for representative quotas, and advocacy for equal pay and maternity protections, they transformed constitutional equality from ideology into a practice of collective self-definition. Motherhood—once a private burden—became a shared political platform through which women articulated claims to recognition, welfare, and autonomy. This identity as women-citizens was not pre-given; it was forged through constitutional activism itself. In petitions, speeches, and draft revisions, activists deliberately named themselves as women, asserting membership in a political constituency whose labor, bodies, and voices required constitutional acknowledgment.
Reproductive autonomy lay at the heart of this project. Control over reproduction shaped access to education, employment, and public life, and it fostered new solidarities among women through clinic consultations, home visits, and networks of mutual support. As woman doctor Sun Yanyu wrote, women must “voluntarily, consciously, and actively exercise control over their reproductive capacity,”Footnote 103 thereby framing women’s equal citizenship as the freedom to choose whether and when to reproduce rather than the obligation to do so.
Yet feminist strategies carried inherent tensions. By linking motherhood to national welfare, activists not only gained political leverage within dominant ideological frameworks but also reinforced a normative ideal of womanhood that the state later codified and regulated. Their constitutional gains, though significant, remained vulnerable to biopolitical and patriarchal logics that continued to define reproductive autonomy as contingent and conditional.
Ultimately, this history underscores both the possibilities and limits of seeking gender equality through constitutional reform under statist conditions. It reveals how constitutionalism could serve simultaneously as a mechanism for state consolidation and as a platform for feminist transformation. At the same time, it highlights the continuing need to re-center reproductive autonomy not as an instrument for fulfilling national obligations or improving population health but as a foundational principle of equal citizenship for women, an aspiration that remains unfinished but continues to animate feminist constitutional thought today.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Xiaowei Zheng, Laura Kalman, Chao-Ju Chen, Fei-Hsien Wang, Xiaoping Cong, Jin Jiang, Chuchu Wang, and Chaoran Ma for their advice and inspiration. I am also sincerely grateful to Dennis J. Wieboldt, the host of the American Society for Legal History/University of Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium, and to Michel Hockx and Abbie Reese for their invaluable comments and suggestions. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the support of the Ying-shih Yü International Center Visiting Junior Fellowship at National Taiwan University, which made this research possible. I also wish to thank Gautham Rao and the anonymous reviewer for their insightful feedback, which greatly strengthened this article. Finally, I owe a special debt of thanks to my friends who generously shared with me their experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. Their candid reflections on the joys, hardships, uncertainties, and difficult choices surrounding reproduction continually reminded me throughout the writing of this article that reproductive autonomy is not merely a historical question, but an enduring lived reality.
Open access
