Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women's Suffrage in China
Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women's Suffrage in China, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2008, xii, 334 pp.Gender, Politics, and Democracy offers an account of Chinese women's struggles for political suffrage from around the turn of the twentieth century to the eve of the Communist victory in 1949. Edwards argues that the term "canzheng," suggesting political participation in general, was understood by female political activists in the first half of the twentieth century in the more concrete sense of "suffrage," "centring on the twin rights to vote and to stand for election associated with the full political franchise of full citizens"(17) The book's focus on the public political activities of women represents a refreshing change from the preoccupation with sexuality and the private life, especially among US scholars, that often says more about the concerns of contemporary American feminists than about their Chinese subjects. Indeed, a basic argument of the study is that the call for women's suffrage sought to force a shift in the consciousness of both men and women from a privatising understanding of women's virtue in terms of sexual chastity to a public sense of virtue, hitherto monopolised by men, which measured worth according to public norms of ability and accomplishment, especially education.The account is guided by three premises. First, while the "suffragists" were only part of a broader women's movement, and restricted in their aims and constituency, they were historically significant both for what they represented and what they achieved. The domination of the women's movement by radicals from the 1920s, and in hindsight consciousness with the victory of Communism, has consigned the suffragists to historiographical obscurity as a marginal elite group of women largely irrelevant to mainstream concerns with issues of social reform and transformation. While the suffrage movement had developed a limited mass following by the 1920s, the leadership came from the ranks of elite professional women, mostly from wealthy backgrounds and foreign educated, which rendered the movement suspect in the eyes of radicals. And while these leaders spoke to social issues in a limited way, the movement remained focused throughout on women's right to suffrage, raising questions about the role private ambition played in their activism. Edwards argues, nevertheless, that while progressive men also took a significant role in the promotion of women's rights, the women who pursued the cause of suffrage provide important evidence of women's agency in achieving women's goals. Equally, if not more importantly, in the priority they gave to political rights, the suffragists were instrumental in fostering a consciousness of women as not just a social but also a political category with distinct collective interests of their own. This also rendered them a component of women's political movements globally.Edwards argues, secondly, that while the suffragists were also nationalists, this should not detract from their feminism in a reductionist privileging of nationalism, which is a pervasive problem in the historiography of modern China. Nationalism may have been a driving force of Chinese politics, but it was itself a site of contestation and interpretation in conflicting visions of China. She rightly points out that nationalism carried a different meaning at different times and for different constituencies. "As the women's suffrage movement..explored gendered notions of political citizenship," she writes, "they invoked these ever fluctuating conceptions of nationalism and national benefit as it suited their political goals" (5) Rather than political opportunism, we might add, the deployment of nationalism in feminist causes is best grasped in terms of a feminist standpoint that, similarly to other political positions, perceived nationalism in terms of particular group interests and political visions.Finally, and most importantly, the suffragist movement was driven by a simultaneous affirmation of equality and difference between men and women.