From Female Students to Pioneers of Women's Movement in Tianjin during May Fourth Period: A Study of Women's Discourses and Experiences

This thesis studies a group of female leaders of women's movement in Tianjin from the late 1910s to mid 1920s by analyzing their discourses and experiences. In exploring their early years from being students at a women's normal school to being pioneers of women's movement and the meaning of this period in their lives, the present study also covers the connection between the change of female social identities and their subjective consciousness and actions. Meanwhile, male and female discourses of feminism were compared to examine the interaction between men and women, and how the change in gender relations affected women's situations as individuals and a group, their strategies of struggle, and so forth. These women's collective memories in Tianjin reflected the characteristics of the city's women's movement and the influence of its social and cultural particularities on the construction of gender relationship. This thesis advocates to historicize gender studies so as to avoid the teleological pitfalls of Western feminist grand theories in the studies of Chinese women's/gender history.;By analyzing the experiences of these women as female students of Zhili First Women's Normal School, organizers of women's societies, and publishers of women's newspapers, this thesis reveals how they made use of public resources to achieve self-empowerment and lead women's movement in Tianjin. They proposed to construct a society of equality where men and women cooperated with each other. To strengthen women's movement, they drew men's attention and support. When reconstructing the gender relationship, the challenge they met not only came from conservatives who criticized their behavior, but also from some men who harassed them in the name of free social contact and free love. On the one hand, various critiques reflected complicate minds of different men. On the other, responses made by these women manifested their subjectivities.;This study also investigates these women's private lives that were mostly neglected in previous studies. In analyzing their emotional experiences of marriages and domestic affairs, this thesis argues that the women's movement in public sphere did not change women's roles and gender relations in families too much. Child care, housework, and double burden of career and domestic obligation tired them out body and mind. However, men did not take women's difficulties, perplexities and bitterness seriously. Without deep understanding of women's situations, men's sympathy was superficial. They even blamed women for causing the problems themselves. And the contradiction between words and actions reflected the limitations of these women. It also evinced how patriarchal social structures conditioned the process in which women discovered themselves and fought for their rights during the Republican period when diversified ideas and thoughts coexisted. What I intend to point out here is that some long existing paradoxical phenomena in the private sphere appeared already at the very beginning of the women-led women's movement in modern China. The roots of the problem cannot be identified by studying the public sphere only.