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Book Review
| Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women's Suffrage in China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp. 352. $60.00 (ISBN 978-0-8047-5688-4).
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| In Gender, Politics, and Democracy, Louise Edwards traces the movement for women's suffrage in China during the first half of the twentieth century. During these years, "suffrage" distinctly meant, as it still does in the West today but no longer in China, the right to vote. Yet Edwards approaches the Chinese campaign for women's suffrage more broadly as the fight for equal rights in political participation, which is what it achieved. Given how the topics of feminism and women's suffrage in China have been treated historically, one cannot be faulted for thinking that only an insignificant elite was concerned with women's right to vote and that these activists were linked with a failed "bourgeois feminism"; or that "the women question" was largely a tool used to further nationalist and other particular political ends; or that suffragism was irrelevant in a period of failed democratic electoral politics and had little to do with the "real struggles" of these revolutionary decades. Edwards, however, documents an "impressive record of feminist success" (2), and her work shatters these assumptions by offering new and important historical insights. |
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The author narrates how after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, women gained equal political rights in several provincial constitutions and began to sit in local legislatures. Activists from privileged backgrounds "crafted political identities for themselves as women that were both public and antagonistic" (5–6). With the aim of proving themselves equal to men, the first women suffragists had a distinct military bent due to their participation in overthrowing the Qing. Despite betrayal in 1913 by their male colleagues who formed the new republican governments that followed the Qing, the early suffragists' unsuccessful campaign for equal constitutional rights "laid the foundation for the more successful campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s by creating the space in which a sense of a legitimate women's political collective identity could develop" (66). |
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As occurred across the spectrum of political activism, the suffrage movement broadened by the 1920s to include middle- and working-class women. As women began to be elected to public bodies at the village to the provincial level, the idea took hold that the only way to ensure women's equality was for women to hold political positions of power. Edwards argues that from within the campaign and their newfound political and public positions, the suffragists demonstrated the existence of an independent feminism, distinct from that linked with nationalist and political ideologies. She shows the suffragists pushing for "changes to fundamental social and economic structures in their espousal of an explicit agenda for increasing women's power and influence relative to men. Regardless of an individual woman's perspective on the preferred political system, the public appearance of women leaders in advocacy roles on behalf of women as a collectivity increasingly ensured that no political party could ignore the question of women's status and role in society"(6). By 1936, the draft constitution of the national government guaranteed women equal rights. By 1946, the movement achieved constitutional equal rights and a ten percent quota for women in the national legislature (195–98), electoral laws still in effect in Taiwan today and in China until the late 1980s. |
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Space constraints limit discussion here to only a few issues Edwards raises. A vital lesson of women's suffrage in China is that the campaign's successes were due to pragmatism rather than theoretical purity. The campaign initially argued that men and women were equal as humans and citizens, but in response to political failures and the difficulty of changing cultural norms, it also began to focus on gender difference. While still relying on the concept of gender equality as called for, the campaign simultaneously "created a sophisticated political conception of 'women' by establishing a collective notion of women's unity of disadvantage; that is, women's common political interests derived from their collective disadvantage relative to men" (104). Like other disadvantaged groups, this allowed women to advocate for political protection and special rights, including quotas to overcome the small number of women directly elected. Since this concept of difference was based on the collectivity of women, it overcame the problem of essentialized separate spheres and diminished the fracturing of the movement along class or ideological lines. |
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Edwards also takes on the difficult task of untangling feminism and nationalism by uncovering how both were in constant flux during the period covered. She also demonstrates how suffragists reshaped gendered notions of virtue; highlights the vibrancy of democracy and political activism outside the two main parties of the Republican era; and recasts the suffrage movement as an international event where China, as well as other overlooked countries, impacted events in developed nations. This fine book deserves a wide audience and is easily read by those outside the China field. |
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| Allison Rottmann
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| Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences |
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