The ‘New Virtuous Wife and Good Mother’: women intellectuals’ group identity and the Funü Zhoukan (Women’s Weekly), 1935–1937

Abstract

This article, in seeking to explore women’s lives in Republican China during the Nanjing decade, offers a case study of the Funü Zhoukan (Women’s Weekly), the supplement of Guomindang’s Central Daily News, between April 1935 and August 1937. After its foundation, the Nanjing Guomindang government set a benchmark for women to be good national subjects by taking on the role of the ‘virtuous wife and good mother’ instead of the ‘modern woman’ who had emerged among middle and high class families in major cities. While the Women’s Weekly promoted the discourse of the ‘virtuous wife and good mother’, women intellectuals argued that women could take on such responsibilities only through education, participation in the professions and politics and by gaining a degree of economic independence. Thus, the idea of a woman’s place being solely at home was defeated in the Nanjing period, but the issue of women’s full role in society was left unresolved because of women’s confusion about the dual responsibilities of home and society.