ABSTRACT
Female participation in physical exercise and competitive sport. it is suggested, had particular significance for women's emancipation and the May Fourth Era. Although studies of Chinese women 117 have observed that women challenged certain fundamental elements of the feudal system and culture - demanding marital reform. the freedom to love and to divorce. the right to vote and to education - not one of these commentators has pointed out the crucial relationship between exercise. women's bodies and women's emancipation in this period. Only Helen Snow's Women in China (1960)118 and Bobby Siu's Fifty Years of Struggle: the Development of the Women's Movements in China 1900-1949 (1975) have given the relationship a passing glance, and a superficial one at that. ll9 They have all missed the essential point that the pursuit of physical freedom was an integral part of women's emancipation in China. The importance of the relationship between the New Culture and May Fourth Movements, women's physical freedom and women's emancipation has also been overlooked by more general historians yo They mention women's liberation in this period, but have wholly failed to do justice to the importance of female physical emancipation. In fact. they have mostly ignored it. Arguably. this fact says more about Western and Eastern intellectual traditions than it does about the actuality of Chinese history.
