Essay / Visual Culture and Conceptions of Womanhood: ‘The Modern Woman’ in 1920s-30s Chinese Images and Film

by Rahma Wiryomartono

edited by Phoebe Lee

INTRODUCTION: THE MODERN WOMAN

In 1920s-30s Republican-era China, there were many contending interpretations of the identity of the modern woman. Some viewed her as an independent career woman who set aside traditional marriage expectations to pursue her professional goals.[1] Alternatively, she could be an educated, skilled, and urbane housewife who navigated urban environments with ease.[2] Politically motivated women, like the suffragists, also counted as modern women.[3] Despite these different answers, one fundamental quality defined the modern woman: she lived and felt at home in the city.[4] Since the idea of the modern woman is inextricable from the urban context, this paper will examine the urban-rural divide and how industrialization disrupted traditional gender norms in the 1920s and 30s. Afterward, it will examine images of the modern woman in mass media and analyze how the concept was shaped and manipulated to suit different agendas of the period.

During the early 20^th century in industrial centres like Shanghai, female participation in the workforce surged and the visibility of women in the public sphere increased.[5] The modern woman symbolized a revolutionary departure from the traditional gender roles and traditions of the countryside.[6] These shifts in gender norms were notably illustrated in contemporary visual culture. Representations of the modern woman appeared widely in visual media such as paintings, films, advertisements, photography, calendar images, and magazine pictorials. Yet none of these images were politically neutral. Different social and political motivations operated behind representations of the modern woman in Chinese visual culture of the early Republican period.

Positive depictions of the modern woman embraced her as a figure of progressiveness, cultural advancement, and urbane sophistication. Conversely, negative representations treated her as a morally corrupt and corrupting product of depraved urbanity. Portrayals of the modern woman frequently highlighted women’s sexual, political, and financial independence. Disapproving audiences would often link the concept of the modern woman to the perceived moral corruption of not only the city, but also of Western influence. On the other hand, approving audiences would celebrate the cosmopolitanism and societal advancement that the modern woman symbolized. Thus, visual mass media revealed the varying public reactions to changes within a rapidly developing cities. In the case of the modern woman, the examination of visual culture illuminates the conflicting societal attitudes concerning female sexuality, shifting gender norms, and moral judgments.

THE URBAN-RURAL DIVIDE AND THE CASE OF SHANGHAI

The concept of the modern woman highlighted the widening gulf between urban centres and rural areas of Republican-era China. Although it is extremely difficult to generalize patterns of women’s lives in the rural context – given that the geographical scope was so wide and gender norms varied from region to region – the American economist John Lossing Buck carried out an extensive survey of female participation in agriculture during the 1920s.[7] Buck created the department of agricultural economics at Nanking University in 1920, and his students carried out a survey of 16,786 farms and 38,256 farm families from 1920-32.[8] The results of the study revealed that 13% of farm labour was done by women, but this figure was higher in the rice-growing regions of the south, where women did 16% of the farm labour.[9] Women’s agricultural labour participation was the highest at 26% in Guangdong, southern Jiangxi, and northern Fujian, all of which are double-cropping rice areas.[10] Though Buck’s work was the most extensive survey of agricultural economics ever undertaken, Chinese economists criticized it for its group selection: his students reported on their own families and villages, which were more prosperous than the national average.[11] However, Buck’s work highlighted the variation in rural women’s lives, as revealed by the differences in agricultural participation rates.

In terms of a gendered division of labour, rural women mainly did domestic work, such as spinning and weaving.[12] Rural expectations and labour norms, whether in the home or on the farm, became disrupted with the onset of rapid industrialization in the 1920s-30s, which significantly altered the economy.[13] The number of factories exponentially grew during this time period in urban centres, notably in Shanghai.[14] Shanghai had a booming textile industry, and young girls from the countryside often migrated to the city out of economic necessity to work as cheap labourers in textile factories.[15] Consequently, female migrant workers made up a sizeable portion of Shanghai’s industrial proletariat.[16] Women became highly visible in the public sphere, whereas before, they were mainly cloistered in the home due to the domestic nature of women’s work.

Factory employment offered women greater financial independence. In some cases, women who worked in factories did not reside with their husbands, or only started to live with their husbands once the couple’s first child was born. In these cases, traditional marriage expectations were disrupted.[17] Female textile workers in Shanghai often formed ‘sworn sisterhoods’ with each other.[18] These sworn sisters frequently migrated from the same villages and formed a sisterhood as a support system away from home. They stood in solidarity with each other, as exemplified by the frequent protests and strikes that took place in Shanghai textile factories.[19] For example, in Shanghai cotton mills where the workforce was primarily female, women organized protests against poor working conditions, ill-treatment, and withheld wages.[20] In 1922, the Shanghai Women’s Industrial Progress led a strike involving 20,000 workers in the silk industry.[21] The 1920s-30s saw the increase of female political organization and labour participation alongside rapid industrialization and urbanization. Amid these dramatic changes in urban Chinese life, financial independence and active political participation became defining qualities of the modern woman.

VISUAL CULTURE IN 1920s-30s SHANGHAI PICTORIALS

Visual culture does not only encompass the fine arts: it includes all forms of publicly consumed visual media.[22] Thus, visual culture encompasses images from advertisements, illustrations, films, paintings, photography, calendar pictures, and magazine pictorials. Visual culture is prevalent in everyday life, and as a result, its content reflects popular attitudes and concerns of a given period. By examining a time period through its visual culture, one can pose historical inquiries through a field of cultural production. In Visual Culture: Image and Interpretations, Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey argue that visual culture is “actively engaged in organizing and structuring the social and cultural environment.”[23]

During the 1920s-30s, Shanghai was the centre of China’s modern transformation.[24] It was not only China’s industrial powerhouse, but also the site of mass protests, anti-colonial nationalism, and radical ideologies.[25] Ideas were freely floating in Shanghai, and they were disseminated by the city’s active and booming publishing industry. The golden age of the Shanghai pictorial press occurred from 1912-1937.[26] According to Carrie Waara, the rise of the Shanghai pictorial press “demonstrates a belief among Chinese artists and entrepreneurs in the power of visual representation to construct a vivid, new culture.”[27] Most of the artists and entrepreneurs involved in the Shanghai pictorial press were working to advance an agenda of modernization.[28] The concept of the modern woman was tied closely to this agenda, and representations of the modern woman flourished in the visual culture of the 1920s-30s.

W.T.J. Mitchell writes that “the realm of vernacular and popular imagery clearly has to be reckoned with,”[29] due to the fact that such imagery has a profound effect on the social and cultural order of its geographical context. Visual representations of the modern woman in Shanghai print culture illustrate how gender norms were changing, and how new conceptions of womanhood were introduced. In his article “Artwork, Commodity, Event: Representations of the Female Body in Modern Chinese Pictorials,” Yingjin Zhang argues that in Shanghai pictorials, visual representations of the female body, the modern woman, could be classified as either artwork, commodity, or event.[30] As ‘artwork,’ the idealized female body represents the essence of feminine beauty and caters to male aesthetic tastes and demands for erotic connoisseurship. As ‘commodity,’ the female body was used for visual consumption and to promote sales, like in advertising. Zhang argues that the circulation of artistic female nudes in Shanghai pictorials falls under this category, as the female nudes helped promote magazine sales while enhancing the modern and revolutionary reputation of the magazine.[31] As ‘signifier,’ the female body symbolized the insertion of what Zhang calls “a threshold where the traditional was forced to admire the modern.”[32] Traditionalist Chinese artists, who were often born and educated in Imperial China, had to confront questions about the status and survival of their art in modern times.[33] In this threshold, publicly-circulated representations of the female body symbolized a culturally significant event, namely, the modernization of China, as embodied in the visual portrayals of the modern woman. The allure of the modern woman could compel even the most traditionalist artist to admire modernity.

The female nude of Shanghai pictorials functioned as a revolutionary representation of the modern woman. Writing about East Asian art history, John Hay asks: “Why does the body seem to be almost invisible in a figurative tradition that flourished for over two thousand years?”[34] Mark Elvin pursues a similar line of inquiry and argues that “the unclothed human body was not seen as an aesthetic object in China before Chinese taste was – in the largest cities – influenced by Western ideas on this subject.”[35] Yet in the 1920s-30s, photographs and other visual representations of the female nude became popularly-circulated in Shanghai-based pictorials such as Liangyou (The Young Companion) and Meishu shenghuo (Arts & Life). Popular magazines like Liangyou, Meishu shenghuo, and Zhenxiang huabao (The Truth Pictorial) were concerned with promoting a national cause and asserting art’s positive effect on the public readership.[36] Shuqin Cui also remarks on the tradition of invisibility in regard to the female body in Chinese art, citing social space, gender norms, and rhetorical conventions as reasons why the female body was so rarely portrayed.[37] Cui argues that the female role in the domestic sphere and the limits of expression imposed by Confucianism made it improbable for the female body to be the subject or the medium of artistic creation.[38] Thus, portrayals of the female nude in Shanghai pictorials defied traditional gender norms and expectations, offering a revolutionary portrayal of womanhood by representing the publicly-exposed female body as an artistic subject.

Magazine readership consisted of educated groups who could afford to buy them – such as businessmen, bankers, landlords, and other professionals – as well as the greater number of people who shared such texts – such as students, shop clerks, and office workers.[39] The demand for art magazines increased in the Great Depression years of the late 1920s and the 30s among the upper and middle classes, who desired cultural stimulation and entertainment amid the pervasive gloom of the Depression era.[40] Waara asserts that publishing is an authorizing act, since it creates and reinforces the hierarchy of cultural capital.[41] By publishing female nudes, magazines like Liangyou and Meishu shenghuo set themselves up as vanguards for China’s modern art, shaping the tastes of their audiences in the process.[42] The modern woman is portrayed as being comfortable enough with her body and sexuality to publicly expose it as an art object: this bold attitude goes up against traditional Confucian expectations that girls and women be modest, cloistered in the home, and obedient to their male family members. 

As Elvin points out, the female nude was rarely seen in Chinese art before widespread Western influence. Waara also argues that the inclusion of female nudes in Shanghai-based pictorials helped to reinforce their editors’ reputations as cultural experts who were well versed in translating Western modernity for a Chinese audience.[43] Modernity and the modern woman were characterized by cosmopolitanism and liberated forms of sexuality, qualities which are arguably best represented in images of the female nude. Portrayals of the female nude received mixed responses from audiences. When viewed in a positive light, the artistic female nude was a symbol of progressiveness, sophisticated aesthetic tastes, and cultural advancement. However, when viewed negatively, the female nude ­– and by extension, the modern woman – signified the moral corruption of urbanism and the detrimental effects of “Western pollution,” since the female nude was associated with uncontrolled sexuality, prostitution, and the degeneracy of the city.[44] In this view, the city was seen as a corrupting influence because of its urban cosmopolitanism and Western-influenced bourgeois culture. Thus, negative responses to representations of the female nude were tied to concerns over vices: the unabashed modern woman was conceived as a unique product of  morally corrupting environments like the city.[45]

Representations of the female nude also opposed Ming-Qing ideals of female beauty as it was portrayed in art. In the Chinese artistic tradition prior to the Republican period, the body was largely invisible.[46] Representations of the female body in visual art rarely existed. Patrons and subjects of the visual arts were mainly from the upper classes, and socially privileged women were housed inside residential gardens or female chambers.[47] In the Ming and Qing dynasties, the ideal female beauty in the artistic imagination was a lovelorn, melancholic, physically and emotionally vulnerable woman who longs after her absent lover.[48] This conception is meant to evoke feelings of sympathy in the observer, who would pity her social limitations and lack of self-esteem.[49] She is sequestered indoors, yearning for another presence from the outside world. This cloistered, imagined beauty is contrasted with the exposed female nude, a subject who does not pine for only one lover and whose body is exposed to the public.

ADVERTISING AND THE MODERN WOMAN

Due to their sheer ubiquity, advertisements were the most common type of visual media consumed by urban dwellers.[50] During the 1920s-30s, the modern woman was frequently employed in advertising, as both a curated subject as well as a targeted demographic. As a subject, the modern woman was represented in visual media for public consumption in order to sell products. As an audience, middle to upper class female urbanites were targeted by advertisers who wished to capitalize on their purchasing power. Women’s consumerism was celebrated in the Republican era, as images in mass media encouraged shopping as a respectable and stylish feminine pastime.[51]

The concept of the modern woman was often represented in advertisements in Shanghai-based pictorials of the 1930s to sell household, fashion, and lifestyle products. In the article “Shanghai Women of 1939: Visuality and the Limits of Feminine Modernity,” Shu-mei Shih studies the relationship between gender and Chinese modernity through the lens of advertising, specifically advertisements in the 1939 issues of the lifestyle magazine Shanghai shenghuo (Shanghai Guide). According to Shih, there were two forms of Chinese modernity. One type was masculine, while the other was feminine. When modernity was presented as a nationalist resistance to imperialism, it was articulated in masculine terms, since this form of modernity implied a struggle against encroaching external forces.[52] On the other hand, the feminine form of modernity was acted out in everyday life through lifestyle choices. In this form, Shih asserts that one’s modernity was displayed through lifestyle choices like dress, manners, and consumer habits.[53]

As a historical and visual subject, the female body embodies female narratives and visual representation.[54] Advertisements included in the 1939 issues of Shanghai shenghuo display women smoking, flirting with men, and in different stages of undress. Like the female nude, the women represented in these advertisements defy traditional gender expectations of modesty, chastity, and obedience by navigating public environments independently and showing off their bodies. The advertisements not only sell the products they are displaying – cigarettes, jewelry, or drinks, for example – but also a certain fashionable lifestyle. Modern women are portrayed as stylish, progressive, and desirable. Publishers of magazines did not only cater to readers, but also to advertisers.[55] Advertisers wanted to reach specific audiences: in the case of Shanghai pictorials of the 1930s, they wanted to attract an urbane audience through representations of the modern woman.[56] Thus, the modern woman was used in advertising as both a selling point and a target audience in advertisements of the 1920s-30s. Advertisers manipulated the concept of the modern woman in order to encourage urban middle and upper class female participation in consumer activities.[57]

THE MODERN WOMAN IN FILM

The modern woman was a frequent subject of Chinese films of the 1920s and 30s.[58] She was both reviled and adored, depending on the agendas of filmmakers. Many films focused on the human tragedies of city life, as the city was widely perceived to be a dark and uncaring place that encouraged immorality. In films like The Goddess, A Dream in Pink, and Peach Blossom Weeps Tears of Blood, the virtuous protagonists come up against evil, morally corrupt dwellers of the city. The silent 1934 film The Goddess (dir. Wu Yonggang), follows the story of an unnamed young woman who works as a prostitute in Shanghai in order to support her son. Prostitutes were regarded as the most modern of women, since sex work opposed Confucian values of chastity, domesticity, and obedience.[59] However, the protagonist of The Goddess is portrayed in a sympathetic light. She is a devoted, nurturing, single mother who struggles to fund her son’s education, turning to prostitution in an act of selflessness. A gambler named Zhang abuses her. After she kills him, she gets sentenced to twelve years in prison, but she asks her son’s new guardian to tell him that she is dead, as she cannot bear for him to carry the shame of having a mother like her. In The Goddess, the protagonist sacrifices everything for her son, implying that the real moral corruption derives from the city rather than herself. Shanghai is depicted as a dark, dangerous, and depraved place, in contrast to the protagonist’s initial humble dwellings. The heroine is a modern woman because of her line of work as a prostitute and her urban environment. In this way, The Goddess suggests that the modern woman is not an ideal that should be idolized or pursued.

The 1932 film A Dream in Pink (dir. Cai Chusheng), similarly portrays the modern woman in a negative light. The plot follows a writer who gets seduced by a modern woman whom he meets at a nightclub, an exclusively urban setting. The writer leaves his traditional wife for this woman, but the woman flirts with other men and eventually leaves him as well. In the end, the writer returns to his virtuous wife. This film is clearly a cautionary tale against the modern woman of the city. Although the modern woman is initially desirable, she cannot be trusted, since she lacks the fundamental female virtues of obedience and fidelity. A Dream in Pink also treats the city and its inhabitants as corrupt. This theme of urban corruption is also explored in the 1931 silent film Peach Blossom Weeps Tears of Blood (dir. Bu Wancang), which was made in Shanghai. In this film, a farmer’s daughter becomes seduced, corrupted and deceived by a wealthy man from the city, whose mother refuses to approve of their relationship. The film portrays rural people as honest and hardworking, and urban people as idle, deceitful, and snobbish. In The Goddess, A Dream in Pink, and Peach Blossom Weeps Tears of Blood, the modern city is a site of fundamental depravity. The films set up strict dichotomies between urban and rural lifestyles, designating the former as immoral and the latter as virtuous.

Even though film was a relatively new medium in the 20s and 30s, filmmakers could use it to protest products of modernity, especially the modern woman. In such cases, films can communicate a yearning for a bygone era, the relics of an idealized past. At the same time, films of the 1930s popularized actresses who were regarded as modern women, such as Violet Wong, Wang Renmei, and Zhou Xuan. These women often played the role of the “songstress” ­– an exclusively urban entertainer who performed as teahouse hostesses, opera actresses, street singers, nightclub chanteuses, and political revolutionaries.[60] Songstress figures of 1930s Chinese films were essentially modern and cosmopolitan. Their vocal techniques were often derived from Western jazz and pentatonic folk melodies, and they were widely admired for their glamour, artistic skills, and independence.[61] The popularity of the songstress figure and the actresses who played them reveals the enormous influence of the modern woman in popular culture of this time.

Film had the power to convey different ideals of feminine virtues. When filmmakers disapproved of the modern woman, they were able to portray her and her environment as degraded and immoral. Such films emphasized ideals of feminine chastity and filial piety to a broad audience. Conversely, films could also promote a different model of ideal femininity characterized by glamour, sophistication, and worldly knowledge – traits of the modern woman. The diverse representation of the modern woman in Chinese cinema of the 1930s demonstrates the significance of this concept in cultural productions and their audiences.

CONCLUSION

In the Qing Dynasty, women were expected to stay in the home and limit their labour to the domestic sphere.[62] The concept of the modern woman became popularized during the Republican era, especially during the 1920s and 30s, which were decades of rapid industrialization in China. The modern woman opposed traditional values and gender roles through representations of her independence, open sexuality, political activity, and urbanity. She represented a break from rural expectations and norms for women. Visual culture such as art, films, photography, and advertisements in 1920-30s China illustrated the changing gender norms of that time. Different social and political agendas were at play in creating these visual portrayals of the modern woman, as outlined by the varying ways this concept was portrayed in mass visual media. In this respect, visual culture is an invaluable medium for examining societal attitudes during a seminal epoch in modern Chinese history, as well as within a shifting social landscape.

Rahma Wiryomartono is a U4 English Literature and History student. She is interested in the visual art traditions of East Asia and the ways in which intercultural exchanges are facilitated through art. She likes to paint and study the aesthetics of different cultures. 

NOTES

[1] Bailey, Paul. Women in the City and Countryside before 1949, 79-99.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Kuo, Jason C. Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s-1930s. Washington: New Academia Publishing, 2007, 1.

[7] Bailey, Paul. Women in the City and Countryside before 1949, 79-99.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Stross, Randall. The Stubborn Earth: American Agriculturalists on Chinese Soil, 1898-1937. University of California Press, 1989.

[12] Ko, Dorothy. Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, 2.

[13] Bailey, Paul. Women in the City and Countryside before 1949, 79-99.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ping, Wang. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 39.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Bailey, Paul. Women in the City and Countryside before 1949, 79-99.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Kuo, Jason. Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s-1930s, 2.

[23] Bryson, Norman; Michael Ann Holly; Keith Moxey. Visual Culture: Image and Interpretations. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994, xviii.

[24] Kuo, Jason C. Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s-1930s, 1.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid., 6.

[27] Waara, Carrie. “The Bare Truth: Nudes, Sex, and the Modernization Project in Shanghai Pictorials,” 164.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Mitchell, W.T.J. “What is Visual Culture?” Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside ed. Irving Lavin. Princeton: Institute for Advanced Study, 1995, 208-10.

[30] Zhang, Yingjin. “Artwork, Commodity, Event: Representations of the Female Body in Modern Chinese Pictorials” in Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s-1930s ed. Jason C. Kuo. Washington: New Academia Publishing, 2007, 123.

[31] Waara, Carrie. “The Bare Truth: Nudes, Sex, and the Modernization Project in Shanghai Pictorials,” 165.

[32] Zhang, Yingjin. “Artwork, Commodity, Event,” 123.

[33] Andrews, Julia F. and Kuiyi Shen. “The Traditionalist Response to Modernity: The Chinese Painting Society of Shanghai,” 79.

[34] Hay, John. “The Body Invisible in Chinese Art?” Body, Subject and Power in China ed. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 42-3.

[35] Elvin, Mark. “Tales of Shen and Xin: Body-Person and Heart-Mind in China during the Last 150 Years,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body ed. Michel Feher. New York: Zone Books, 1989, pt. 2, 312.

[36] Waara, Carrie. “The Bare Truth,” 171.

[37] Cui, Shuqin. Gendered Bodies: Toward a Women’s Visual Art in Contemporary China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016, 17.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Waara, Carrie. “The Bare Truth,” 167.

[40] Ibid., 168.

[41] Ibid., 165.

[42] Xhang, Yingjin. “Artwork, Commodity, Event,” 121.

[43] Waara, Carrie. “The Bare Truth,” 167.

[44] Kuo, Jason C. Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s-1930s, 6.

[45] Bailey, Paul. Women in the City and Countryside before 1949, 79-99.

[46] Cui, Shuqin. Gendered Bodies, 18.

[47] Ibid., 17.

[48] Ibid., 18.

[49] Ibid.

[50] Pang, Laikwan. The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007, 103.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Shih, Shu-mei. “Shanghai Women of 1939: Visuality and the Limits of Feminine Modernity,” in Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s-1930s ed. Jason C. Kuo. Washington: New Academia Publishing, 2007, 123.

[53] Kuo, Jason C. Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s-1930s, 6.

[54] Cui, Shuqin. Gendered Bodies, 9.

[55] Waara, Carrie. “The Bare Truth,” 167.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Kuo, Jason. Visual Culture in Shanghai, 7.

[58] Bailey, Paul. Women in the City and Countryside before 1949, 79-99.

[59] Ibid.

[60] Ma, Jean. Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, 4.

[61] Ibid., 6.

[62] Pang, Laikwan. The Distorting Mirror, 103.

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