Considering the heightened interest in gender-related topics in recent years, it is somewhat surprising that there has been no full-length study in English of the Chinese women's suffrage movement. Much of the existing scholarship, in the form of articles and chapter-length pieces, has come from Louise Edwards, who has now drawn together years of research into a sustained account of Chinese women's struggle for political rights from 1898 to the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
Drawing from a wide array of newspapers and journals of the time, Edwards argues that “China's feminists moved pragmatically between arguments based on women's inherent equality with men and those based on women's difference from men” (p. 2). They saw these as complementary rhetorical strategies, rather than the fundamental philosophical difference that divided American suffragists. Indeed, one of the propositions running through the book is the reminder not to take the...