About The Ladies' Journal

The Ladies' Journal

The Ladies' Journal (Chinese: 婦女雜誌; pinyin: Fùnǚ Zázhì) was a Chinese monthly women's magazine published by the Commercial Press in Shanghai from January 1915 to December 1931. It was the longest-lasting and widest-circulating women's magazine of Republican China: produced by the largest publishing house in the country, it ran for seventeen years, reached a circulation of about 10,000 copies by 1921, and chronicled — and helped to shape — the transformation of Chinese women's lives through the New Culture and May Fourth eras. In its pages, editors and (increasingly) women writers debated women's education, family reform, work, love, marriage and emancipation for a growing urban female readership; in its covers, designed in the international commercial styles of the day, it pictured the changing ideal of Chinese womanhood. The magazine is closed, but its complete run survives, and it has become one of the most intensively studied periodicals in the scholarship of modern China.

The Journal belonged to the Commercial Press's great family of magazines, launched in the years around the 1911 Revolution as the Press — which already published the Eastern Miscellany (from 1904) and the Chinese Educational Review (from 1909) — expanded into every major readership segment. A women's monthly was among the most ambitious of those ventures: it presupposed a female reading public large enough to sustain a commercial magazine, and its seventeen-year success proved the presupposition right.

Founding by the Commercial Press, 1915

The Commercial Press began publishing the magazine in January 1915, with the Chinese name Funü Zazhi and the English alternate title The Ladies' Journal printed in its pages. It was one of nineteen new journals created by the Press shortly before and after the 1911 Republican revolution to satisfy — and profit from — the public demand for reading matter. Its first editor was Wang Yunzhang, who also edited the Press's Fiction Monthly, and it began with a circulation of around 3,000 copies.

The Press brought formidable advantages to the venture: a decade of experience with the highly successful Eastern Miscellany, its own type fonts (it had produced kaishu type by 1909), printing plant of the first rank, and a national distribution network. Its magazines were printed with movable type on Western paper in the modern magazine format, with stapled bindings and stiff paper covers — material qualities that made the Journal a modern object in its readers' hands as well as a modern voice in their homes.

Early character: the conservative years

Later commentators describe the Journal's early years as conservative, and its initial contents matched a reformist-but-cautious programme for its readers: coverage of domestic issues, women's education, hygiene and household management, together with serialised short stories, mainly in the established taste. It was initially written in classical Chinese — the literary language that restricted its audience to the classically educated — and its editorial voice was predominantly male, as was that of nearly all early Chinese women's periodicals.

Even so, the founding of a durable commercial women's magazine was itself a social fact. Historians count some forty-four women's journals published in China and Japan between 1898 and 1911 and another thirty between 1912 and 1915; nearly all were short-lived. The Ladies' Journal outlasted them by professionalising the genre — regular monthly publication, a major publisher's production values, and content that treated women's education and the reform of the family as serious, continuing subjects rather than as campaign slogans.

The turn to the vernacular and the New Culture era

The magazine's language tells the story of its transformation. It began publishing short stories in written vernacular Chinese in 1917 — the year Hu Shi's literary-reform manifesto appeared in New Youth — and had fully transitioned to the vernacular by 1920. The shift widened its potential readership decisively, since the vernacular was the language of the new girls' schools whose pupils and graduates formed the magazine's growing audience.

Content moved with language. Through the New Culture and May Fourth years, Chinese society experienced a wave of women's-liberation discussion, as intellectuals attacked traditional patriarchy and feudal ethics; the Journal became one of the principal public arenas in which that attack — and the resistance to it — was conducted for women readers themselves. Studies of the magazine take its treatment of women's occupations as an index of the era: across its run, the definitions of suitable work for women multiplied and changed, and the magazine's pages registered the competing claims of motherhood, profession and independence that Republican women had to negotiate.

The Zhang Xichen editorship and the reform era

The magazine's most reformist period came after Zhang Xichen became editor-in-chief in 1921. Under Zhang, the Journal opened its pages to the era's most contentious questions — free-choice marriage, divorce, sexual morality, women's economic independence — and to a growing number of women contributors. Circulation reached about 10,000 copies by 1921, making it the widest-circulating women's magazine of its time, and its authority came to rest on this combination of commercial reach and editorial seriousness.

The scholarship on the Journal emphasises the interplay, across these years, between male editorial agency and female authorial subjectivity: the editors framed the debates, but women writers increasingly supplied the arguments and the testimony, and the magazine's letters and essays preserve women's own accounts of education, work, courtship and family pressure in their own words. That archive of voices is a principal reason historians of Chinese women treat the Journal as an indispensable source — it is one of the few Republican periodicals in which women speak at length, in print, to other women.

Cover art and visual culture

The Journal's covers have drawn a scholarship of their own. A Cambridge study of its cover art across 1915–31 reads the covers as persuasion in pictures: the intersection, made visible month by month, between the publisher's commercial aims and the society's changing image of women. The twelve covers of the first volume carried the same masthead in large standard-script calligraphy reading right to left across the top, with date, volume and issue arranged in the margin and the English alternate title printed below the illustration — a format that joined Chinese bibliographic tradition to the modern magazine's visual grammar.

By the late 1920s the design language had transformed. The Press chose the Journal's designers from those working in the new international modernist style — Qian Juntao, who designed covers until the departure of editor Ye Shengtao in the spring of 1931, and his younger colleague Zhang Lingtao among them — and the covers of the final years speak the Art Deco idiom of contemporary Shanghai. The sequence of covers, from calligraphic formality to modernist glamour, is itself a visual history of the Chinese "modern woman" the magazine addressed.

Readers and social reach

The Journal's readers were the new urban female public created by the girls' schools, women's colleges, mission schools and normal schools of the Republican era: students, teachers, nurses, clerks, writers and educated housewives, together with the male reformers who read women's magazines as programmes for national change. Its reprint edition runs to seventy-two volumes, and original issues survive in collections from Shanghai to California — evidence of a distribution that reached the treaty ports, the provincial capitals and the overseas Chinese student communities where so many of the era's women's journals were also produced.

Set against its competitors — Women's World (1904–07), the Women's Eastern Times (1911–17) and the host of shorter-lived titles that brought the total of Chinese women's journals toward 250 by the late 1930s — the Journal's distinction is endurance plus centrality. It was the Commercial Press's title, produced by the era's largest publisher at the highest production standard, and it lasted longer than any rival. For advertisers, educators and reformers alike, it was the women's magazine of record.

Closure in 1931–32

The Journal was already struggling financially, from decreased advertiser investment during the Great Depression, when the end came. Its final issue was dated December 1931. Weeks later, in the January 28 Incident of 1932, the Commercial Press's headquarters were destroyed in a month-long battle between Chinese and Japanese forces in Shanghai — the catastrophe that broke the Press's golden age. The Ladies' Journal was cancelled in that wreckage and never revived: the longest-running women's magazine of Republican China ended with the world that had made it.

Scholarly afterlife

The magazine's second life has been in scholarship. It is one of the four seminal women's journals — with Women's World, the Women's Eastern Times and Linglong — at the centre of the Heidelberg "Chinese Women's Magazines" research project, whose database recovers its covers and contents; a Taiwanese-Japanese project produced scholarly essays and a detailed print and online catalogue of the journal; and Cambridge's collective volume on women and the periodical press in China's long twentieth century opens with a chapter on its cover art. Research libraries hold the reprint and the originals, and the Journal is a standard source in the history of Chinese women, education, employment, publishing and design.

That afterlife is the measure of the magazine's historical weight. For seventeen years the Ladies' Journal taught, entertained and argued with the first mass female readership in Chinese history, in its own language, in a form — the commercial monthly from a great publishing house — that joined profit to emancipation in the characteristic Republican mixture. Its pages and covers remain the fullest single record of what Chinese women were told, and what they answered, between 1915 and 1931.