Funü shibao (The Women’s Eastern Times)
Funü shibao (The women’s eastern times) bore witness to seven crucial but as yet poorly understood years in modern Chinese history. Its first issue dates to June of 1911 and four issues appeared before the abdication of the Qing dynasty in early 1912. The last of the remaining seventeen issues was published in May of 1917. Funü shibao was one of the handful of gendered journals to survive the scrutiny of Yuan Shikai’s censors in the early Republic and the longest lived. It made important contributions to ongoing discussions about revolution, women’s suffrage, and education, issues that were hotly debated in the late Qing and revisited at the time of the May Fourth Movement. Its importance lies less in its record of seismic political change, however, than in its documentation of more subterranean social, cultural, and linguistic shifts that would become defining features of the Chinese Republic.
Here are some of the scanned pages of Funü shibao:
