Abstract:
This paper explores the ways in which the Chinese women’s suffrage movement used
racializing narratives to alter the boundaries that had excluded women from full participation in politics
in the first two decades of the 20th century. It extends existing work on the connection between
narratives of race and women’s suffrage in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and
the USA to explore how ‘‘race’’ was mobilized in China in the late-Qing and early Republican period.
The article has three main areas of innovation. First, it explores the deployment of racializing narratives
within the broader discourses of modernity circulating in China wherein modernization was premised
on a racialized notion of national identity—that is ‘‘modernization as Han chauvinism.’’ Second, this
article aims to participate in the process of extending the history of women’s suffrage from primary
reliance on class analysis and towards methods that explore the multiple categories of exclusion and
inclusion. Third, this article aims to explore the manner in which narratives of race were invoked within
a feminist political campaign that occurred in a nation without a history of European colonization. The
article demonstrates that the multiplicity of possible gains sought under the banner of ‘‘race’’ makes it
an unreliable category to invoke for struggles that are ultimately determined by ‘‘gendered’’ divisions.
