【Note】"Defense" is a series of dialogues around new literary and historical books, each issue invites young scholars to write reviews for new literary and historical research works in Chinese and English academic circles, and the original authors respond to them, aiming to promote the exchange and dissemination of literary and historical research results.
In this issue, Cao Xiaohua, assistant researcher at the Institute of Literature, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, is invited to discuss with three young scholars her new book "Late Qing Vernacular Newspapers and the Germination of Modern Women's Consciousness (1898-1911)" (referred to as "Late Qing Vernacular Newspapers and Modern Women's Consciousness", Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2022). This article is a review article.
"Vernacular", No. 1, 1904, founded by Qiu Jin
Late Qing Dynasty China has always been a hot research object in Chinese and foreign academic circles. In recent years, many scholars have excavated new historical materials and perspectives to lead us back to the late Qing Dynasty and restore the specific life situation under the era of national decline and frequent wars. As a unique resource, the noisy and refined newspapers and periodicals provide us with a possibility to return to the scene of the late Qing Dynasty.
In this context, Dr. Cao's new book, The Late Vernacular Press and the Germination of Modern Women's Consciousness (1898-1911), seeks to examine the intertwining of vocabulary and gender, consciousness and writing, family affairs and state affairs during this important period of change.
The book is divided into two parts, with a total of seven chapters. The first four chapters focus on listing representative styles in vernacular newspapers and analyzing the transmutation and spread of these styles under the influence of old and new women's studies. In the context of the integration of family and country, the next three chapters deduce how late Qing women gained initiative in different roles, but they still struggled.
Dr. Cao Xiaohua's story begins in 1898, an "eventful autumn." In the first chapter, by tracing back to the Wuxi Vernacular News, edited by Qiu Tingliang and written by his niece Qiu Yufang, Cao Xiaohua accurately identifies a struggle in this period of vernacular practice: although vernacular deduction improved the accessibility of practical knowledge and ideas, late Qing women remained confined to the cage of traditional female discipline. Whether it is Qiu Yufang's propaganda of women's studies based on internalized "mother religion", or the collective portrait of more late Qing women as silent masses in urgent need of enlightenment, between the old and new female studies, late Qing women are really dilemma. The attention to this kind of wandering situation of the riding tiger runs through the subsequent discussion of the work. The second chapter examines the oratory articles of the "Honorary Body" to tease out how late Qing scholars imagined, interpreted, interpreted, and exploited women's suffering. The speakers tried to show "touching experience", but quietly planted the logic of women's weakness and thus the weakness of the country in the admonition. Binding feet is a small matter for women, but a big thing for the country. Chapters 3 and 4 start with new songs and improved plays, respectively, and explore their interaction with female precepts. In different forms of media, the new songs and operas of the late Qing Dynasty once again reflect the dilemma of women in this period: on the one hand, vernacular songs such as Mian Xue songs, foot songs, and broken fan songs tried to break the old and establish the new, so that traditional etiquette norms and folk superstitions were widely attacked. On the other hand, these changes also updated the expectations and constraints for women. Their call to become the mother of the nation and the "heroic female" of the defense of the country composes another change in the tone of the female commandment. The enthusiasm of female education enlightenment has also spread to the stage, and new plays such as "The Biography of Ms. Huixing" and "Women's Patriotism" have effectively promoted the popularization of female studies. But, as Chapter 4 writes, the "new" feminine consciousness at this stage still has to compromise with the "old." On and off the stage, the proper name of female students needs to be supported by Confucianism, and women are still shrouded in patriarchal gaze when they enter public places such as schools and theaters.
Chapter 5 and 6 of the following part deals with equal rights for men and women, and free marriage on the other. Chapter 5 focuses on clarifying how "equal rights for men and women" has constructed a new image and demand for "women nationals". With the help of vernacular newspapers, it became possible for women to go outside the country and enter schools and factories. But at the same time, the call for equal rights for men and women cannot escape the fate of becoming a concerto of the melody of saving the country and saving democracy. The image of the new woman folds contradictions between paper and reality. Female student Yun Qi, because of her eloquent focus on national education rather than family education, was rejected by girls' schools, and even fell into the nickname of "Wild Fork Lady" in the market. The women's education based on motherhood and the affirmative action movement based on the premise of differences between men and women have put the "wild fork lady" like Yun Qi into a gray area. Chapter 6 reminds us that the concept of "free marriage" was split into "freedom" and "marriage" in the course of its spread. "Freedom" is intertwined with eugenics and evolution in the process of translation, and marriage has become a state affair. The expectations for women in the late Qing Dynasty are still limited by the positioning of "mother" and "wife". The responsibility of "marriage" is indeed "freedom", but the freedom here does not refer to the individual, but to the nation. The penetration of national discourse into women is particularly evident in Chapter 7. As victims of patriarchal regulation, late Qing women became the cause and antidote to the national crisis. The "new" woman, while gaining a certain degree of agency and expanding the possibilities of the field of life, finds that there is only one way: to go to the country, to assume the motherhood, and to wait for enlightenment. The bell of the female world must wait for the power of the family and the country to ring through the arm of the man. Therefore, Cao Xiaohua reminds us that the help of national discourse gives women the opportunity to "speak". It is true that in the late Qing narrative, we find that the nation is the only solution to the women's problem. We can't imagine a women's movement in the absence of a nation – and that's perhaps even more deserving.
Dr. Cao Xiaohua's work can inspire readers in different dimensions. Can we imagine another kind of feminine consciousness and movement that can give women rights and interests without national responsibilities? In other words, is there an alternative to the male-dominated national discourse to reimagine and promote social progress? Do women's consciousness and rights have to be based on the differentiation and renewal of women's discipline? Are there gender in national discourse and social mechanisms? The Birth of Chinese Feminism (Columbia University Press, 2013), edited by Liu He, Rebecca Karl, and Dorothy Ko, provides some important clues to answer these questions. By perusing the criticism and appeal of He Yinzhen, a feminist theorist of the late Qing Dynasty and editor-in-chief of Tianyi Bao, we find that He Yinzhen's analysis is different from that of male or female intellectuals of the same period. For He Yinzhen, "women" should not be the way or means to solve "bigger" propositions such as ethnic issues, international relations, and consolidating male authority. In her writing, "women" become a category that transcends history, and is the concentrated emergence and embodiment of various social rights inequalities. How "women" and "gender" have become historical production methods deserves more thought.
In addition, if we imagine female readers of late vernacular newspapers, their reading experience should go beyond the literal level. The visual experience of various newspapers and periodicals, as a sensory impact, also comes from illustrations, advertisements, typography, and many lithographed pictorial magazines born at this stage. In recent years, scholars such as Chen Pingyuan have published a series of treatises on lithographic technology and pictorial vision, and the dual dimension of literary practice and women's studies adopted in this book may also draw on this perspective of the relationship between graphics and text, focusing on the depiction and shaping of women's consciousness by visual experience. The sensory experience brought by these vernacular newspapers and their circulation as commodities, and how a series of processes such as publishing, promotion, and distribution participate in the construction of women's consciousness, should also provide inspiration for more research.
The visuality of newspaper media has become a common concern in academic circles in recent years. Laikwan Pang, in the first chapter of The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China, University of Hawaii Press, 2007, identifies the "pictorial turn" in late Qing media: images are no longer a supplement or decoration to words, but become the main information carrier. "Seeing pictures" becomes a vital part of the reading experience. From illustrating the use of advanced machines, to depicting horse racing, to portraying the experience of foreigners visiting Yamen torture instruments, the images of late Qing newspapers and periodicals are filled with excitement and anxiety about seeing and being seen. This visually-centered reading experience has become an important process for the late Qing Dynasty public, especially urban residents, to imagine, understand and adapt to daily changes. Taking the late Qing dynasty press as the node, Rania Huntington and Bao Weihong cast their eyes on tradition and the future, respectively. In "The Weird in the Newspaper" (in Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan, Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), Han Ruiya places the imitation of "strange things" in late Qing newspapers into the strange writing tradition. Periodicals such as Dianshizhai Pictorial enrich the imagination of new stories, ghost stories, folk religion, etc. under the collision of China and the West with images. Foreignness has become a new curiosity. Bao Weihong pays attention to the audience as a visual element in "Panorama World View: Exploring the Visuality of "Dian Shizhai Pictorial". The audience in the pictorial stands in groups according to social status, and the interaction between gender and architecture is obvious. Women usually watch at the door, upstairs or inside the door, while prostitutes are more often seen in public. A viewing subject formed by curious viewers in the city arises. Bao Weihong insightfully connects onlookers in the late Qing Dynasty pictorial with voyeurism and the early cinema viewing experience. The panoramic visual experience adopted and cultivated by Dian Shizhai Pictorial has shaped a modern perceptual ability and intervened in the history of early film introduction to China.
In the visual experience of late Qing newspapers, women are crucial. Joan Judge, in Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press, University of California Press (2015), looks at the 1911 book The women behind the Women's Times as authors and readers. In fact, these female readers overlap highly with the group of female authors: both progressive and upper-class professional women and female students. Ji Jiazhen's research looks at the unique group of "Republican Ladies." These new women are different from traditional ladies or modern girls, they record and share daily experiences through writing and images, especially for a series of women's experiences such as pregnancy and childbirth. Based on their contributions and readings, a social network of women spread along the distribution of newspapers and periodicals. At the same time, Ji Jiazhen cautioned that the Women's Times is still a publication edited and dominated by men. To a large extent, it often needs to compromise with the values of male editors and society's acceptance of women. For the writers and readers of the Women's Times, image can progress and words can be expressed, but all this is still widely constrained by male-dominated ethics. And daily life experience has also become another battlefield where such ideas and practices are intertwined. For identifying the turbulent transformation of late Qing society and the collision of gender consciousness, quotidian is a very effective research dimension. Paying attention to the daily is to pay attention to the process of how ideas and concepts are practiced, experienced, localized, materialized, and embodied. Through the reductive analysis of daily life, it is worth more attempts in the study of modern China to reflect on the historical stage or social change of the whole.
We might as well turn our attention to Yongzhou, Hunan from the late Qing Dynasty to the early Republic of China. Han officials who wrote Dao county chronicles and customs records in the late Qing Dynasty observed that local Yao-dominated women often chose to "marry late"—here, the concept of "late" comes from comparing the age of marriage with the Han people. These Han officials wrote this speculation into the county record: "Fools want to keep women to make work." As for the phenomenon of "women not marrying", these doctors attributed it to the "fools" who needed female labor. At the same time, other scholars understand this phenomenon of "late marriage" as one of the ways in which women oppose the Confucian system of etiquette.
Jiangyong and other counties under the jurisdiction of Yongzhou gave birth to a special writing and cultural system - Nüshu. Nüshu is a script created and used by women and widely used in Jiangyong and other regions. Although the origin of Nüshu is still elusive, a coin with the inscription Nüshu from the Taiping Rebellion found in Nanjing suggests that this writing system has been around since at least the late Qing Dynasty. With its "exclusive female characteristics", Nüshu literature records the psychological clues and life patterns of Yao women, and assists in establishing a series of customs of worshipping sisters. However, in Nüshu literature, there is neither anxiety about "late marriage" nor depiction of labor. In fact, the reason why Jiang Yong's women really "married late" may be hidden in another county record during the Guangxu period: "In the custom of Yizhong, marrying women is more than wife." All women love their daughters, so that some marry as late as thirty. Echoing this, the Nüshu ballad also records a series of emotional connections and interactions between mother and daughter and sisters who worship them. The so-called "late marriage" is actually a choice made by Jiang Yong's women with the permission of their mother and the emotional connection of their sisters, and such a choice has nothing to do with resistance. Although it is still difficult for these women to escape the role requirements of marriage and motherhood, their initiative in social networks and emotional support has been ignored in the imagination of writing "other" in the county chronicle and the construction of scholars' "marriage resistance".
This sideline story suggests another possibility. In the process of restoring the life status, rights awareness, and gender discipline of women in the late Qing Dynasty, how we really let women speak out is worth investigating. Can we move away from the mainstream perspective of "Han standard" and "Manchu/Han interaction" and replace it with a more regional look back to supplement or correct the conclusion of universality? The search for the consciousness of women in the late Qing Dynasty may require more local sex and imagination.
The book "Late Qing Vernacular Newspapers" combines macroscopic historical materials with close reading of texts, but it is also meticulous. Although it focuses on the late Qing dynasty, this book also has some enlightenment for the present. In today's time when gender issues often resonate and are hotly debated, this book can also provide some lessons across time dimensions on how we guard against instrumentalized progressive discourse, how we liberate women from the passive context of waiting for rescue, and how we create a public discourse space that respects and recognizes women's subjectivity.
"Late Qing Vernacular Newspapers and the Germination of Modern Women's Consciousness (1898-1911)", by Cao Xiaohua, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, August 2022, 289 pages, 58.00 yuan