Abstract The concluding chapter sums up the main arguments discussed in the preceding chapters, which examine the roles modern women played in the introduction of modern designs and lifestyles to Chinese culture. Tradition is preserved through reinterpretations in the hybridized usage and representation of foreign commodities, to appeal to and to suit Chinese consumers. The same can be said of female identity and the images of women that resulted from the cultural and social changes. Women could not live and behave as their ancestors had done and needed to transform and adapt to modern ways of life, which in turn redefined their identities and roles within the family and society.

Keywords: Material Culture, Modern Woman, Modern Lifestyle, Tradition

This book has set out to examine the roles that modern women played in the introduction of modern designs and lifestyles to Chinese culture. It also has looked at how, during this process, women were instrumentalized to ease in modern ways of living but also empowered by it. The cultural and social transformations initialized by modern designs, lifestyles, and tastes became critical for women in defining new identities for themselves in the modern era.

Traditionally, families had expressed their social status through imagery that included household designs before commercially orientated representations of these, such as advertisements, became available. Chapter 2 considers how, in pre-Republican-era China, traditional portrayals of women, furniture, and room settings in many of the paintings or drawings of the time displayed and reinforced a family's social status, as well as the social and familial order of society. These positions were articulated through visual depictions that indicated education, literacy, and an appreciation of craftsmanship—conveyed mostly through the imagery of furniture. Women in such families spent much of their time in their domestic environments and furniture was an important part of their daily life. Families negotiated their status in society while women negotiated their positions within the family in accordance with Confucian doctrines, cultural pursuits (including acquiring products of good craftsmanship), and literary activities. Women in that era were a form of cultural capital for their families, often instrumentalized in imagery to demonstrate the family's cultivation and social standing. Particular characteristics such as frugality and a dedication to honourable activities such as reading and embroidery strengthened a woman's worth.

Abstract

Studio photography flourished as a result of a new sense of self-awareness and became an expression of the new social norms that were being adopted in the Republican era. Photography was accompanied by objects of consumption, and participated in the formation of new identities and advanced social progress. Photography offered room for the imagination or for fantasy at the individual level—of fashioning a new sense of self and of imagining a life with a different social standing, seen in the portraits of women in China at that time. An analysis of the film New Women (1935) illustrates the complex challenges women encountered that generated both progressive changes, such as better social standing, and undesirable outcomes including isolation and prejudice.

Keywords: Cultural Symbolism, Female Perspective, Film, Modern Woman, New Women, Photography

Modernity comprises diverse values and meanings for different people and within this context, the particular roles and identities assigned to women mean that they have often experienced societal changes differently from men. Rey Chow in Woman and Chinese Modernity situates the modern woman in “a process of systemic translation.”1 For Chow, woman assumed the potential for change in modern subjectivity in China. She is the essential intermediate factor that engenders cultural and social redefinition in the social system. Her presence and representation embody the experiences of women in Republican China. Studying how women experience modernity, particularly through the lens of consumerist culture, enables us to explore how everyday experiences reveal social conflicts and aspirations. In her work on Chinese women in the past, Dorothy Ko states that an individual is a property-owning man and she questions woman's individuality through conceptualizing foot-binding as a process of transformation; a practice that ingrained women socially, leaving them with a diminished sense of self.2 Consumerism and modernity enabled, encouraged, and positively promoted a greater sense of the individual and therefore of the self. This transformation played out differently for men and women in China. Investigating these changes through the visual culture of modernity sheds some light on issues that were uniquely experienced by women.

This chapter looks at how women in China, particularly those who were affluent, regained a sense of self through how they were portrayed in photographs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

This chapter examines the role played by visual traditions in new imagery produced for modern lifestyles. It explores how traditional images of women, particularly as portrayed in meiren hua (“paintings of beauty”) and other forms of female representation from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, articulated feminine identities in pre-Republican China. Meiren hua served as decoration in women's rooms or as an embodiment of the beauty that occupied the room and as illustrations for novels and stories.1 Subtle similarities and differences can be seen through a comparison between traditional meiren hua and modern advertising in the form of advertising posters. Such comparisons are also useful in considering how womanhood and modernity were entwined through hybrid design, and how ideas of femininity changed amidst changing cultural and social values.

It is impossible to ascertain the identity of the women depicted in meiren hua, but they are generally educated, wealthy, and privileged. Many were courtesans while others were women from elite or noble families. Details in the compositions often signal their social status, and the differences will be explored below. Compared with advertising posters, the meiren hua offer a window into a world where tasteful accoutrements of material culture and literary and cultural achievements of the women of the family were key components of a family's cultural capital. These ideas of what constituted cultural capital changed drastically in the Republican era, as did ideas of and experiences of femininity.

Women in China were relatively liberated until the end of the Song dynasty (960–1270), after which the rise of moralist Confucianism led to drastic changes that restricted their freedom for centuries.

The new roles of women as consumers impacted on society in Republican-era China, helping usher in a new modernity to its urban centres. As goods from overseas began to make their way into the urban market, they were accompanied by new modes of representation as foreign producers sought to advertise unfamiliar products, to appeal to the Chinese market. The imagery in many of the advertising posters of these times, also known as yuefenpai (“calendar posters”) because the design initially featured a calendar in its composition, was often directed towards women or deployed images of women. Such advertising or calendar posters were developed in the early twentieth century introduced from the West and printed in colour lithography, targeting local rather than expatriate consumers. By the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), a number of artists in China specialized in designing these posters. They were ubiquitous, gifted by merchants, sold in market stalls on the streets, offered as rewards to customers who purchased specific amounts of products and to attract magazine subscribers. They decorated the interiors of ordinary people's homes and transformed the visual culture of early twentieth-century China, particularly in large urban cities like Shanghai. This mass deployment of images of women served as a marketing methodology, which effectively instrumentalized women as objects. However, it also initiated a particular form of spectatorship for women, which ushered in new ways of experiencing and perceiving womanhood and which in turn had a knock-on effect on the sense of identity and subjectivity felt by them. Apart from promoting new ideas of taste that were associated with modernity, new consumption patterns also began to blur existing social hierarchies in local society. This chapter explores these ideas of representation and spectatorship, and their impact.

In Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China (2006), Frank Dikotter proclaims that “modernity had to be brought home in order to propel one's country into the universe of ‘civilized’ nations and join a universal march towards a better future.” Once the objects of modernity began to seep into everyday life in China, and particularly once they made inroads into the domestic realm, women began to play a very particular role in this hybridized experience of modernization. Evidence of this role can be gleaned from representations of women, the home, and objects in the home. The designs of many of these objects that date to the Republican era (1912–1949), and to a lesser extent the pre-Republican era, demonstrate this hybridity, underlining the intersection between tradition and modernity, and reflecting an experience of modernization that is clearly not a European one.

This chapter focuses on the representations of some of the traditional objects of consumption in the domestic realm, particularly furniture, that preceded the Republican era. It also looks at representations of ways of life that centred on consumption, particularly at paintings of home and street life. Together, these offer both a context to explore the centrality of women in the consumption that later characterized modernization in China, and a counterpoint to these new modes of consumption that are discussed further in this volume.

In order to resist the demands of a modernity embedded in nineteenthcentury European culture, non-Western societies typically looked to cultural traditions that were closer to home, often holding on to values of the past that supposedly affirmed unchanged principles. The adherence to tradition and ideas of cultural authenticity, while a form of resistance to Westernization, also posed a challenge for the modern Chinese.

This book has been, as they say, a long time coming. The conventional trajectory for a PhD graduate is for her research to be refined into a publishable manuscript, which was my intent, but which never happened—for various reasons. It took much contemplation, research, and further learning, much of it through my role as a teacher, for this project to be realized—one which derives from my interest in understanding the role women play in modern society. As it stands, the final version is imperfect, eschewing a detailed analysis of gender issues within the complexities of modernity, to allow for a focus on the criticality of images of, and for, women as China began to modernize in the Republican era. This project was inspired by a number of seminal works, which offer a critical context for the issues it explores.

These works start with Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, where he proclaims that the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relationship among people, mediated by images.1 This view has influenced my thinking about female representation, which, as this book will detail, I do not see as merely a means to objectify women. The representations of women in modern China, to the contrary, generated a system of visual signs that articulated the changes taking place in daily public and civic life, which women were increasingly becoming a part of and, concurrently, influencing in significant ways.

A number of issues need to be addressed in an analysis of the “Modern Woman,” which is the term I prefer over “New Woman” and “Modern Girl.” The two latter terminologies imply the “older” version is outdated and the word “girl” infantilizes women and undermines the role they play in modern society. In the literature I have reviewed, “Modern Woman” refers to the conscientious woman, whereas “Modern Girl” has the undesirable connotation of a frivolous woman who forgets her family and social duties.