Women, reform, and the nation: transnational feminist thought in East Asia, 1870–1920

Abstract

This research analyzes the development of modern East Asian womanhood during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period marked by rapid national transformation in Japan, China, and Korea. Through a comparative reading of primary sources, including feminist essays, women's magazines, reformist manifestos, and autobiographical writings alongside secondary scholarship on gender, nationalism, and modernity, the paper argues that women across East Asia were simultaneously objects and agents of reform. State-driven ideologies such as Japan's "good wife, wise mother" doctrine, China's competing revolutionary and Confucian pedagogies, and Korea's struggles under both internal reform and Japanese colonial rule established repressive models of femininity that sought to control female bodies, labor, and citizenship. Yet these same constraints generated powerful counter-discourses: writers like Na Hye-sŏk, Ding Ling, and He-Yin Zhen challenged moral conventions, articulated alternative perspectives of female subjectivity, and exposed contradictions embedded in modernization projects. By situating these voices within their broader political and intellectual networks, this research demonstrates that modern womanhood in East Asia cannot be reduced to a uniform, state-produced identity. Instead, it emerged through negotiation among reformers, nationalists, colonial authorities, and women themselves, whose writings illuminate competing representations of education, sexuality, domesticity, and public participation. Ultimately, this research highlights the extent to which gender functioned as both a symbolic tool of national progress and its ongoing terrain of resistance. The findings underscore the necessity of examining women’s experiences and writings not as peripheral to East Asian modernization but as central to understanding its ideological, social, and cultural transformations.