Theorizing The New Women: Self-determination And Self-improvement

By Author: linda clinton
Total Articles: 11
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As one of the earliest women writers to publish in the vernacular, Chen wrote in a variety of genres to argue for equal educational and professional opportunities for men and women. Chen grew up in a high-ranking late Qing official's family and received her master's degree in Western history from the University of Chicago in 1920. She worked as a professor, scholar, social critic, and particularly as Diesel Jeans a writer who contributed to progressive journals including New Youth, Eastern Miscellany, and Fiction Monthly in the 1920s. In a series of essays, Chen addressed the issues of women's education and professions, women's suffrage, the relationship between marriage and career, and women's self-improvement.

Chen theorized the new woman, using redefinition to create an image different from those traditionally prescribed. Unlike some women writers and activists who were directly involved in the women's movement, Chen showed her concern for women's issues mainly through writing in different genres. Being exposed to and having studied both Chinese and ...
... Western cultures, she addressed the woman question from a unique cross-cultural perspective. In her 1923 essay "On the Woman Question," Chen discusses the issue of gender equality and urges women to use the opportunities of their times to improve themselves and develop their capacity to the full potential. She first examines the concept of gender equality, refuting both the submissive ideals and the model that turned women into male-like figures. Chen contends that the true essence of gender equality is not to masculinize women, but to give women an equal opportunity to develop their independent character and talent. In other words, many people do not understand gender equality because they either see man and woman as Lee Jeans two absolutely different entities, or they consider man and woman as having exactly the same attributes. Chen questions these reductive views of gender relations, and points out that every person possesses two characteristics the characteristics of gender and the characteristics of a human and therefore, "we women want an opportunity to develop both characteristics". She provides an example to further illustrate her point:

If a woman is talented in mechanical engineering, we should not oppose to her studying it simply because mechanical engineering is traditionally a male occupation. At the same time, if a woman is gifted in house management and cultivating children, we should not prevent her from being a good mother just because we embrace niiquan. However, the society traditionally only gave a woman an opportunity to be a mother, but deprived her of the opportunity to be an engineer. Our only belief is that we should develop every woman's ability so that she can become an active and useful element in the society. This is the true meaning of gender equality. Here, Chen offers a different conception of niiquanzhuyi, one that challenges the dichotomies of male/female, culture/nature, and public/private in the analytical framework of Western feminism. Her vision of niiquanzhuyi counters both the submissive ideals that confine women to the household and the Western (liberal) feminism that uses humanistic ideas to essentialize women's experiences. She uses women's professions as another example to develop her argument, noting that in the past, society simply used the idea of niizi wu cai bian shi de (lack of talent and learning is a credit to a woman's virtue) to deny women access to any social activities.