Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition

Abstract

One particularly neglected facet of the generally neglected 1898 Reform Movement in China is the role of women. Chinese and Western scholars have tended to portray the campaign primarily as a male-led, Western-oriented enterprise in which Chinese women were largely silent and submissive, com-pliant rather than contentious. This article suggests, by contrast, that Chinese women participated in the 1890s reforms as active organizers and sophisticated thinkers. They had their own agenda, agency, organizations, and specific strategies for forming a new Chinese womanhood and for national strengthening. Their approach to reform drew substantially on Chinese traditions of learning with antecedents as early as the Wei-Jin period (220-420); it also reflected more recent traditions of women's literary culture and community in the Yangzi delta during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These open-minded and self-confident women reformers enthusiastically embraced new Western knowledge and attracted effective help from Western allies, both male and female.