ABSTRACT
Writer and historian Ch'en Heng-che was a notable woman of the Republican period. In 1920, she became the first woman professor at Peking University, teaching Western history and English literature. Ch'en was an outspoken social critic and an early advocate of women's right. In The Chinese Woman and Four Other Essays, she discusses two main foreign influences on Chinese women, the Indian and the Western. Like some other Chinese intellectuals of the time, Ch'en believed that Buddhism, which had been absorbed by Neo-Confucianism. Under the category of revolutionary influence of the Western culture on the life of a Chinese woman, none could be more fundamental and significant than the changes that this influence has brought to the family and to the society in which a woman in China has always figured prominently. Another phase in the revolution of a woman's social life is the new conception of the social relations between a man and a woman.
