Wrestling with Tradition: Early Chinese Suffragettes and the Modern Remodeling of the Shrew Trope

Abstract

This article investigates the rehabilitation of the traditional trope of the Chinese shrew in depictions of early Chinese radical suffragettes after the establishment of the Republic of China. It argues that, rather than dying out as China entered the modern age, the shrew became central to the ways in which first-wave feminists were portrayed and perceived in public discourses. Although still typically used to insult women in early Republican China, the archetype of the shrew also functioned as a transgressive model of female empowerment that manifested modern expectations for the qualities of the new woman. Starting from analyses on how the male-dominated media deployed variations of the traditional shrew to describe the visible and confrontational nature of the radical suffragettes, this article then turns to explore how the women themselves played a part in shaping their public images. They, as social actors, exhausted every right and freedom to carve out new subjectivities for themselves to perform in society. In sometimes aligning with and other times rejecting their public labeling as shrews, the suffragettes opened a new direction for understanding the vitality of the shrew trope and for conceiving of the newly emergent public or political woman at the turn of the twentieth century.