4. Education for the Chinese girls under Japanese Government
In term of education, Chinese girls were educated by the Japanese Government.. In addition, Moise explained, “… The status of women rose; a small but increasing
proportion of them obtained formal education, and the custom of foot-binding began to decline 50”. It is seen that education is developing and the existence of old
custom is vanishing. Furthermore, Twitchett and Fairbank in Buck clearly reported, “Of the 87.000
persons surveyed …, 45.2 percent of the males and 2.2 percent of the females reported receiving some schooling. … 66 percent reported that the education they
received was in the traditional style 187”. From that report, it is clear that women in this era received a traditional style school which is still limited.
5. Women and Leadership in the Chinese Communist Movement, 1921-1945
The women’s movement during Communist party hold entire China seen clearly by Edwards, he states “With the disintegration of the central government
following Yuan Shikai’s death in 1916, the focus of the women’s movement turned to provincial-level activity in Hunan, Guangdong, and other locations, where women
registered some success as sympathetic political leaders responded to their demands for an end to discrimination based on sex. But the important development of these
years came with the May Fourth period and the revolutionary movement of the 1920s, which placed women’s liberation on the national agenda”26. It describes that
this period also brought an expansion in the political consciousness of women with social and ideological radicalisation in the Kuomintang, and the recruitment of a new
generation of women into the newly established Communist Party. During China’s long revolutionary years the state both promoted and negated new roles for women.
Edwards observes that these developments brought a new awareness of class to women activists who hitherto had conceived of franchise rights as “equality
between men and women of the educated and privileged classes. Yet the increasing awareness of class furthered the development of the conception that women were
unified as a group because of their collective disadvantage relative to men.” 28.
Gender, Politics, and Democracy offers an account of Chinese womens struggles for political suffrage from around the turn of the twentieth century to the
eve of the Communist victory in 1949. Edwards argues that the term “canzheng,” suggesting political participation in general, was understood by female political
activists in the first half of the twentieth century in the more concrete sense of “suffrage,” “centring on the twin rights to vote and to stand for election associated
with the full political franchise of full citizens”17.
Indeed, Edwards concludes a basic argument of the study is, “the call for women’s suffrage sought to force a shift in the consciousness of both men and
women from a privatised understanding of women’s virtue in terms of sexual chastity
to a public sense of virtue, hitherto monopolised by men, which measured worth according to public norms ability and accomplishment, most notably education” 28.
Dittmer described in Maloney that “…; whereas in the 1950s, only one in ten Party members were female from 1966 to 1973, 27 percent of all new admissions
were women … 185”. It means that women at this era can participate into a certain political action, even though the chance was still limited.
6. Revolutionary Marriage
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