77Book Review
Review of Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in theEarly Periodical Press, by Joan Judge. University of California
Press. 2015
Linda GROVE*
Over the last decade the proliferation of databases providing full text
access to Chinese journals and newspapers from the late Qing through 1949
has radically changed the research styleof scholars in the ﬁelds of modern
Chinese history and literature. No
longer do we have to travel to libraries
in China to search out rare copies ofearly 20th century journals: now, withthe click of a mouse, we can searchauthors and subjects across hundreds ofjournals, download pdf ﬁles, and begin
to read. There is no question that readyaccess through use of such databases
has allowed scholars to undertake
research projects that would have been
impossible a few years ago—not only opening the door to projects that use
quantitative data to explore changes in ideas and language, but also providing
access to relevant articles that appeared in obscure journals that in an earlier
day would never have been consulted.
Well aware of the beneﬁts of the new research tools, few of us stop toconsider what has been lost. In Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, andExperience in the Early Periodical Press, Joan Judge provides a wonderfulreminder of the beneﬁts of reading the old-fashioned way. She shows us how
much can be gained by looking at articles in the context in which they originally appeared, alongside other articles, letters to the editor, photos andadvertisements. We enjoy with her the very materiality of the experience of* Linda Grove is Emerita Professor of Chinese history and Vice President of Sophia
University.

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leaﬁng through an issue of a magazine, exploring the interesting combinationof articles and illustrations that would have been a major part of the experience of a journal’s original readers.
Republican Lens is an extended introduction to and analysis of the ﬁrst
commercial women’s journal published in China, the Funü Shibao.1 The
magazine was published by the Shibao press, which was the publisher of amajor Shanghai newspaper that had been established in 1904 and was closelyassociated with the reform movement led by Kang Youwei and LiangQichao.2 The ﬁrst issue of Funü Shibao appeared in June 1911, only months
before the revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty, and its 21st and lastissue appeared in April 1917, two years before the start of the radical
student-led May Fourth Movement that would change the terms of discussion
about gender and so many other issues. Each lavishly illustrated issue wasbetween 114 and 146 pages, with colorful cover illustrations provided by
specially contracted artists. The magazine quickly gained an audience that
included not only women but also men and Judge argues that the magazine
might best be considered a general magazine with a focus on women, rather
than as an exclusively women’s magazine. Print runs ran between 6000 and7000 copies, and since magazines were commonly passed from reader toreader, Judge speculates that it may well have had a readership of over
140,000.
One of the special features of the Funü Shibao was its use of high quality
photos, and Judge gives much room to the analysis of the photos—oﬀering a
guide on how to read and understand the hundreds of photos that appeared in
the journal. Many of the photos came from two organizations that were partof the Shibao group of companies, the Minying Photo Studio and theYouzheng Book Company, producer of ﬁne arts publications. Republican Lens
includes more than 80 black and white images from the journal as well aseight color plates, allowing the reader to share the visual experiences of earlytwentieth century Chinese readers.
Joan Judge is an ideal guide for this exploration in close reading. She has
published two earlier books on the popular press: the ﬁrst, Print and Politics:
1 Judge’s book grew out of a collaborative project on early 20th century women’smagazines organized by Barbara Mittler of Heidelberg University, Grace Fong ofMcGill University and Joan Judge and funded by foundations from Germany,Canada, and Taiwan. The project has produced a website that includes articles about
and digital reproductions of four major women’s journals, including Funü Shibao.
The website can be found at:[http://kjc-sv013.kjc.uni-heidelberg.de/frauenzeitschriften/index.php]
2 For details on the Shibao publishing company, see Joan Judge’s earlier book, Printand Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China, Stanford
University Press, 1996.

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79‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China is an examination ofthe parent company of Funü Shibao and its relation to the reform movementin the late Qing, and the second, The Precious Raft of History: The Past, theWest, and the Woman Question in China, is an examination of discourses on
women in the late Qing and early Republican periods based on a widereading of newspapers, women’s magazines and overseas student journals.
Her deep knowledge of both the popular press and of the discourses on
women’s issues in the period allows her to draw out multiple and complex
meanings in her reading of Funü Shibao.
Republican Lens begins with an introduction to three approaches toreading that are used in the book, which the author refers to as “horizontal,”“integrated,” and “situated.” The ﬁrst of these approaches involves reading
complete issues of the journal from cover to cover, a method that aims, “torestore the material integrity and social ecology of individual journals andissues of journals by tracing the connections among their images, texts, andadvertisements, and among their contributing editors, artists, and authors”(p.39). The second style, which she calls “integrated” reading, places thejournal in the “textual milieu” of the time, comparing it with other journals
and publications. And the ﬁnal approach “involves ‘situated’ readings of thecontents of the journal in relation to the life trajectories of its authors, circulating biomedical discourses, global commercial forces, and China’s revolutionary history” (p.39). I personally found the horizontal reading of particularinterest since this seems to me to be the element that has been most clearlylost in our contemporary research styles with their reliance on articles
downloaded from databases, separate from the surroundings in which they
were originally located.
Judge spends some time describing the aim of the journal and its editors,
who she argues were striving for a “democratic mode of cultural production”
in which readers were encouraged to contribute both text and photos. The
journal, much like the parent newspaper, targeted what we might think of asa “middle brow” audience, striving to bridge divisions and to share cultural,scientiﬁc and literary knowledge. The journal’s editors placed great stress onrecording everyday experience and urged their readers to contribute shortprose essays, diaries and other records of daily life. While the editors
expended great eﬀort in trying to induce readers to contribute to thejournal—holding essay contests with subscriptions to the journal as prizes—
their eﬀorts were often frustrated. While the journal did get contributions
from readers, many of them were from men—often the husbands of theirfemale readers. Judge notes that one of the complications of analyzing thejournal is trying to determine the gender of authors because of the common
use of pen names. One of those male contributors was the young Gu Jiegang,

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who later became a well-known historian and promoter of the study ofChinese folk traditions. Gu contributed several essays to the journal, using thename of his wife.
A further complication in soliciting work from readers was related towriting style. As we know from the work of many scholars working in
Chinese women’s history including Susan Mann and Dorothy Ko,3 poetry wasa major means of self-expression and communication for well-educatedwomen of a slightly earlier day, and as Judge notes it was the preferred styleof writing for many of those who eventually contributed to the journal.
However, in the late Qing women’s traditional education, especially poetry
writing, had come under attack from Liang Qichao who had argued that,“What people called ‘talented women’ (cainü) in the past refers to those whotease the wind and fondle the moon, pluck ﬂowers and caress the grass, andthen compose some ci or shi-style poems to mourn the spring and lament
parting.”4 The reform movement headed by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao
had been deeply involved in the establishment of the Shibao newspaper, andthe editors of the Funü Shibao shared Liang’s views about women’s poetry,urging contributors to submit their contributions in prose rather than poetry.
In spite of the editors’ wishes, the journal received and eventually publishedmany poems on a wide variety of subjects including politics, the revolution,and daily life experiences, evidence that writing in the poetic mode could be
used for more than frivolous expression of emotions.
Chapter two of the book on Republican ladies discusses the role of Funü
Shibao in making respectable women more visible. As we know from Judge’s
earlier works, as well as the work of Susan Mann and others, until the early
20th century the wives and daughters of good families (guixiu) were rarely
seen in public. One of the biggest changes in the last decade of the Qing andthe early Republic was the gradual acceptance of women in public venues.
The beginnings of formal education for women played a major role in thistransition, as schoolgirls going back and forth to school walked in the streetsin their school uniforms and posed for class photos. Funü Shibao played amajor role in promoting this new visibility of respectable women bypublishing hundreds of photos—everything from class graduation photos to3 Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century,
University of California Press, 1997; Susan Mann, The Talented Women of theZhang Family, University of California Press, 2007; Dorothy Ko, Teachers of theInner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China, Stanford
University Press, 1994.
4 Quoted from Liang Qichao’s Lun Nüxue in Nanxiu Qian, “Revitalizing the Xianyuan(Worthy Ladies) Tradition: Women in the 1898 Reforms,” Modern China 29: 4(2003) 399 454.

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81

wedding and family photos of prominent individuals. Many of the photos
were taken in photo studios, including that of the Minying Photo Studio,
which was located on the third ﬂoor of the Shibao building.
In a later chapter on “liminal sexualities” Judge discusses the methods
she used for a cultural reading of the photos. Before Funü Shibao began itseﬀorts to include the photos of respectable women in the journal, mostphotos of Chinese women were of courtesans. Beginning in the last several
decades of the 19th century courtesans in Shanghai had begun to have theirphotos taken as a form of advertisement, and the Youzheng book company
which was aﬃliated with the Shibao group not only produced ﬁne art reproductions, but also albums of photos of courtesans. These albums were often
advertised in the pages of Funü Shibao. So one of the questions Judge ﬁrst
faced was how to tell the diﬀerence between photos of courtesans and thoseof respectable women. Judge discusses her approach, which involved looking
at the clothes and poses of the women in photographs. Since many of theportraits of respectable women were taken in the same photo studios andoften used the same painted background curtains and props, the easiest way
to tell whether a photo was of a courtesan or a respectable woman was theattached text: courtesans were usually identiﬁed only by their names, while
the names of respectable women were always followed by the honoriﬁc“Miss” (nüshi).
Judge notes that from the late 19th century on, courtesans were seen as
fashion leaders, and there was a popular genre of posed studio portraits inwhich courtesans were pictured with the various symbols of modern life, forexample riding in “airplanes” and automobiles. While most of the photos that
included such props were studio portraits of courtesans, in the conclusion
Judge picks up the story of Zhang Xiahun, who is often referred to as China’s
ﬁrst female ﬂyer. Photos of Zhang and references to her accomplishments
have appeared in many studies on the visual culture of the early Republic. I
had seen these photos in earlier studies and assumed that Zhang was China’sﬁrst female pilot—since the photos dated from a time when the ﬁrst female
aviators were making an appearance in the West. Judge’s account of theevents behind the photo—of how Zhang Xiahun visited a ﬂight exhibition andinsisted on taking a ride, making her the ﬁrst Chinese women to ﬂy in anairplane. She was not, however, a pilot. Judge’s account continues the story,
noting that the ﬂight ended in a crash that injured Ms Zhang, and the bookincludes a later photo of Zhang that shows her as an unremarkable woman
wrapped up in heavy clothing, a very diﬀerent image from that of the female
ﬂyer.
Funü Shibao had another major goal—to spread scientiﬁc knowledge,
particularly information that should be of particular importance to women.

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Chapter four, on public bodies, is a detailed analysis of the journal’s articles
on reproductive health. In the early twentieth century China had unusuallyhigh maternal and child mortality rates and the editors of the journal devoted
much space in the journal to promoting safer childbirth methods and theimportance of replacing traditional childbirth assistants with trained
midwives. In their articles on modern medical knowledge and reproductive
health—and in their treatment of other issues related to daily life—theeditors of the journal made extensive use of materials from Japanese journals
and newspapers. Many of those involved in editing and writing for thejournal had studied in Japan, and they drew heavily on new knowledge andmaterials from Meiji-Taisho Japanese media. In some cases the materials weremarked as translations from Japanese, but in many other cases articles
adapted ideas from Japanese publications without oﬀering explicit recognitionof the sources.
The chapter on “public bodies” also oﬀers an intriguing analysis of theadvertisements for various kinds of patent medicines. Advertisements formedicines like “Dr. William’s Pink Pills for Pale People” often included
testimonials from real people. The advertisements, which promoted various
patent medicines that were designed to deal with problems that particularly
aﬀected women including menstrual pain, were usually in the voice of male
relatives (husbands or fathers) of the woman who was featured. This wasagain another way in which respectable women were made visible—in thiscase not with photos, but with illustrations that were presented as sketches of
the woman whose recovery after taking the pills was being featured.
Republican Lens makes an important contribution to our understandingof the important changes in gender relations in Chinese society in the ﬁrst
decade and a half of the twentieth century and of the role of the popularpress in creating and spreading new visions of a society in which women
were active participants. The book picks up and ﬂeshes out many of thethemes of the author’s earlier work that showed that important changes ingender relations had begun in the late Qing at least a decade or more before
the launching of the radical May Fourth movement.5 The focus in this volume
on visual images makes the book very accessible to a larger audience, and canalso serve as methodological guide for those who are interested in exploring
the burgeoning world of the popular press in pre-war Chinese society.

5 For a discussion of Judge’s earlier work and that of others whose work critiquedunderstandings of gender history in the early 20th century, see my essay“Reconsidering the May Fourth Consensus: Recent American Studies of Chinese
Women’s History,” which was published in Japanese in Gender History, no.5 (2009),
pp.107 114.