Feminist Campaigns for Quotas for Women in Politics, 1936–1947

Abstract

From Gender Equality to Gender Difference: Feminist Campaigns for Quotas for Women in Politics, 1936-1947 by Louise Edwards In the decade from 1936, Chinese women's rights activists waged a successful campaign to win a set minimum quota of seats for women in the national legislative bodies. This little-known campaign is a pivotal part of the history of women's participation in politics in the Republic of China (ROC), since it reflects the strategic shift in the feminist struggle for improvements in women's political rights from activism premised on gender equality to that premised on gender difference. It was a direct extension of the Chinese women's suffrage movement of 1911-1936; moreover, the legislative changes effected are still upheld in current Taiwan, ROC electoral laws. This article explores the campaign through which. Chinese women lobbied for this special quota with the intention of demonstrating that, contrary to common perceptions, an independent feminist movement did engage in distinct activism on women's political rights during the "conservative" periods of Nationalist Government rule and the Anti-Japanese War. The feminists active at this time were much reduced in number and were far more cautious than had been the case in the mid-1920s, but they nonetheless campaigned to further women's political rights and opportunities . Their efforts were rewarded with the inclusion of a ten percent minimum quota in the national constitution of 1946-1947. WHAT 'QUOTA CAMPAIGN'? There are several distinct reasons why previous scholarship has been uninterested in exploring the quotacampaign. Apart from the fact that histories of the Chinese women's movement have been generally scarce until recent years, one reason for the campaign's failure to draw scholarly attention is that it falls between the histories of the women's programs· of the two dominant partiesthe Nationalist Party (GMD) and the Communist Party (CCP)-thathaverightly attracted more attention. Many of the women involved in the quota campaign were aligned with neither party ~Instead they occupied the middle-ground between the two and, in some cases but not all, joined smaller democratic groups Twentieth-Century China, Vol. XXIV, NO.2 (April 1999): 69-105 70 Twentieth-Century China such as the Federation of Chinese Democratic Parties (FCDP). Feminists active in the two majorparties did participate, some taking leading roles, and there is no doubt that support and leadership from GMD women contributed greatly to the eventual success of the campaign. Nonetheless, the two major parties did not directly sponsor the issue and the vitality of the campaign during a difficult decade originated from the alliance of feminists with disparate political perspectives . In the decade after 1936 when the quota campaign was waged, both major parties had moderated their interest in feminist issues. As Christina Gilmartin has pointed out, "After 1927, feminist programs lost their political backing as neither party was willing to repeat the full-scale assault on patriarchal social controls over women that had occurred in the 1920s."1 Thus, scholars inter;.. ested in the history of the women's movement have tended to focus on the years when the major parties took more proactive roles on women's issues. The quota campaign reflects a far more complex array of political interests, and has thus tended to be ignored. A further reason explaining scholarly silence on the quota campaign is that there has been a tendency to regard women's activism surrounding access to political participation as mere· "bourgeois" feminism, and hence the concern of only a narrow, conservative elite. In her discussion of the scholarship on the international suffrage movement, Ellen Carol DuBois argues that there has been a "tendency to dismiss woman suffrage as a conservative development, especially with respect to issues of women's sexual and social freedom. From this perspective, the campaign for political equality appeared to be the least interesting and most narrow aspect of women's efforts for self-liberation."2 In the case of China, middle and upper class women's activism was often regarded as tangential and frivolous when compared to the more urgent needs of peasant and working class women. The sympathy of scholars for the left-wing women's movement has been amplified by...