BUILDING THE NATION THROUGH WOMEN'S HEALTH: MODERN ...

a female readership, thus helping to define and describe these new readers. 517 These modern
newspapers in China – aimed at larger audiences and filled with sometimes trivial news and
advice – were a Western phenomenon. In fact, Shenbao, one of the most well-known Chinese
newspapers, was founded in 1872 by Ernest Major, a British merchant. Mittler notes the
parallels between the content of Western women’s magazines and of those in China, namely
what she calls the “three C’s of the traditional female role: cooking, cleaning, caring.” 518 A
reading public was modern, and so was talking about women’s issues. The very existence of
magazines for women was, as Charlotte Beahan writes, “revolutionary,” as previous literature for
women such as the Lienü zhuan (Biographies of Exemplary Women 烈女传) did not bring news
from the outside world. 519 Magazine covers often featured images of reading women. Mittler
suggests that these new publications for and about women may have created a new readership:
“It may have made them read (or at least be read to). This is all the more probable since the
newspaper, as an alien medium in China, had the potential to create a new audience of
newspaper readers.” 520 Although gentry women had been reading for centuries, these
newspapers targeted lower-class women, along with merchants and peasants. 521 They sometimes
used a pictorial format and either vernacular or a simplified form of wenyan, classical Chinese,
in order to make the literature more accessible to a broader, less educated audience.
That said, however, the number of women who read (or were read) articles and
advertisements about childbirth and child-rearing was a small but significant minority, though
517
Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai's News Media, 1872-1912
(Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004).
518
Ibid., 255.
519
Charlotte L. Beahan, "Feminism and Nationalism in the Chinese Women's Press, 1902-1911," Modern China 1,
no. 4 (1975): 379-416.
520
Mittler, A Newspaper for China?, 246.
521
Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities
in the Early Republican Period (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1995), Susan Mann, Precious Records:
Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
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