Bourgeois women and communist revolutionaries?

This chapter challenges the common historiographical view that presents successes in the Chinese women’s suffrage movement of the Republican period as the result of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership and initiative. On this view, the women’s suffrage movement prior to CCP involvement in late 1924 was little more than an ineffectual dalliance in politics by elite women. ¹ On the one hand, scholarship produced in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has emphasized the marginality of the suffrage movement to social and political change in China. On the other, it has attempted to claim the women’s suffrage initiative as evidence of the CCP’s vision and leadership in democratic reform. Both critical practices underrate the achievements of the women suffragists in early twentieth-century China.