Everydayness as a Critical Category of Gender Analysis: The Case of “Funü shibao“ (The Women's Eastern Times)

Abstract

This essay analyzes the links between the valorization of the everyday and gender in early twentieth century China. While the quotidian had been a topic of discussion for centuries in Confucian family instruction manuals and encyclopedias for daily life, what was new in the late Qing and early Republic was the proliferation of print materials that disseminated everyday knowledge, the links that authors of these materials drew between new scientific learning and the quotidian and the centrality of women as lynchpins between a newly scientized daily life and pressing questions of social evolution and national revitalization. The essay asserts that this link between women and new theorizations of the quotidian is critical to understanding the range of possibilities that opened up for women in this period, and that the everyday is a potentially more productive category of gender analysis than either nationalism or feminism.The authors of the progressive ”Everyday Agenda” were not the well known intellectuals writing for the flagship publications of the reform or New Culture movements. Much of the material on daily life that was published in Shanghai and avidly read by urban audiences dispersed throughout China, was produced by writers for the commercial rather than the intellectual or ideological periodical press. These writers' impassioned quest to explore, expose, and elevate the everyday in the pages of fiction, women's, and general interest magazines is arguably as important a source of historical change as the more widely trumpeted epic social vision of the reformist, May Fourth, and Communist movements.The prime source for this essay is o ne of these publications, China's first commercial women's journal, ”Funu shibao” 婦女時報 (The women's eastern times, Shanghai 1911-1917). The journal's stated objectives were directly in line with the ”Epic Agenda” promoted by late-Qing reformers and May Fourth-era iconoclasts- to promote women's learning in the service of the nation-and much of the journal's content addresses this theme. The focus of this essay is, however, on the journal's alternative and arguably more historically significant ”Everyday Agenda,” which was articulated in its editorial column, discursive essays, essay contest themes, readers' columns, diaries, and surveys. While the point of departure for the Epic Agenda was national weakness and the need to project new global ideals of citizenry downward, the sources of the Everyday Agenda were quotidian, local concerns that had to be elevated through new, scientific knowledge and new inductive methods of education.This essay focuses on two of these prominent areas of concern, which both female and male contributors addressed: women's reproductive health and household education. Whereas most scholars of these materials have posited a stark division of gendered labor, with male journalists critiquing a female realm of inadequacy or male theorists formulating social policy for women to execute, a close reading of ”Funu shibao” challenges the ubiquity of this dynamic. In so doing, it underlines the importance of the everyday as a critical category of gender analysis.