ABSTRACT
In studying Shanghai women’s magazines from the late Qing,1 a new fi gure, a new woman emerges. When she appears on the pages of these magazines, especially in the earliest editions of these journals, she has almost masculine features. Depicted as an equal to men, she is independent, strong and self-confi dent – and thus able to solve China’s problems and to save the country from oblivion. However, in successive issues of the same journals, this type of new woman, independent and in male attire, was to be replaced by a rather different type of new woman who appeared as a perfect ‘femme’, not a female citizen herself, but a most accomplished and modern mother for China’s modern age citizens. Every one of these journals from the fi nal years of the Qing2 demanded acceptance in their early editorials of the new values of equality and female liberation from their (women) readers. Their explicitly feminist rhetoric was, increasingly over time, also concerned with the type of knowledge to be used in household affairs, the three ‘C’s of traditional female role performance: cooking, cleaning, and caring.3 It appeared that if one were to live by the rules of women’s magazines in the last decade of the Qing, one could easily be a new woman without changing that much after all. In these women’s magazines, commonly held notions of femininity remained operative.
