Image credit: Lanterns, by Ran You
Ella Zhang
Read the Faculty Introduction.
Check out the Research Essay Drafting Model based off Ella Zhang’s “Gendered Self” essay for eight elements that were revised from the draft to the finished essay below.
The first decades of the twentieth century in China, marked by the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement, witnessed a process of national invention and significant changes to a society led by intellectuals. Along with this reformation, a debate about women’s liberation and a new gender ideology was brought to the table. On one hand, as Sarah Steven writes in “Figuring Modernity: The New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China,” “Social conservatives supported a cultural ideal of womanhood that accorded with the more traditional ideology of liangqi xianmu (good wife, wise mother)” (82). On the other hand, during that period, another group of women – China’s modern young women who sought to find their subjectivity and independence – emerged. This tension between expressing women’s true selves and conforming to social norms is vividly represented in many Chinese novels, journals, and films. For example, the protagonist Miss Sophia in Ling Ding’s 1927 Miss Sophia’s Diary is a “quintessentially modern woman struggling between self-loathing and self-love, between traditional expectations and modern freedom” (Steven 93). Similarly, The Ladies’ Journal (Funü Zazhi) of the same time presented an image of the “new woman” that incorporated both traditional virtues of motherhood and progressive notions of education (Steven 93).
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