Women's suffrage in China: Challenging scholarly conventions

Abstract

This article has a dual purpose. On one level, it provides an overview of themain stages in the Chinese women's suffrage movement during the first half fo the twentieth century. It explores two key questions: How did women in China lobby to win the right to vote and stand for elections, and how does the existence of this succesful suffrage campaign fit into the dominant understanding that Chinese women gained equality in political rights after 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party gained power? On a second level, the article aims to reveal the unstated narrative conventions underpinning most scholarship on women's suffrage. These theoretical and methodological customs are effective in elucidating the histories of suffrage movements in the Western world but have major limitations when applied to those countries with experiences of colonialism or imperialism. In regions where stability of national borders and government systems was problematic during the period of women's suffrage activism, the campaigns by necessity assumed different forms and utilized culturally specific tactics. The article argues that work on suffrage struggles in non-Western nations will often be unable to provide the closure-geopolitical or temporal-expected in studies of women's suffrage movements from Western nations.