Feminism Women's Agency and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China focuses on a
sensational elopement in the Yangzi Delta in the late 1920s to explore how middle- and
lower-class members of society gained access to and appropriated otherwise alien and abstract
enlightenment theories and idioms about love marriage and family. Via a network of
communications that connected people of differing socioeconomic and educational backgrounds
non-elite women were empowered to display their new womanhood and thereby exercise their
self-activating agency to mount resistance to China's patriarchal system. Qiliang He's text
also investigates the proliferation of anti-feminist conservatisms in legal practice scholarly
discourses media and popular culture in the early Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). Utilizing a
framework of interdisciplinary scholarship this book traverses various fields such as legal
history women's history popular culture media studies and literary studies to explore urban
discourse and communication in 1920s China.
