Befitting its subject, Louise Edwards's monograph on “Hundred Beauties” (baimei) albums of idealized women rendered by some of urban China's leading commercial illustrators is a lovely specimen of twenty-first-century scholarly publishing, with a striking matte-finish cover and abundant illustrations. The six albums on which Edwards focuses were published between 1913 and 1923. They collected almost nine hundred lithograph-printed images, produced as early as the 1870s, that initially adorned periodicals of the late Qing and the early Republic. In Citizens of Beauty, Edwards examines the ways in which these drawings reflected shifting notions of not just the ideal woman's body and behavior but also the moral underpinnings of gender and citizenship. Specifically, she argues that these images promoted a new model of democratic society in which citizens, including women, owed public duties not to the imperial dynasty but to a new Chinese nation.
According to Edwards, the new...
