The violence of the everyday in early twentieth-century China

In the prefatory remarks to his famed 1903 pamphlet Nüjie zhong (A bell for the women's world), the social critic Jin Yi commented, "There is not a place in today's world where male domination of women has not triumphed; if they are not treated as playthings, then they are used as colonized territory [kou bu yiwei wanhao, zi yiwei zhimindi ye]."1 This remark effectively introduced Jin's withering attack on the congeries of social practices that he and many of his political sympathizers and contemporaries saw as shaping the benighted condition of women in late Qing China and the early twentieth-century world. Jin's list of repressive social practices included those concerned with female morality and virtue (daode), the female disposition (pinxing), female abilities (nengli), educational methods (jiaoyu zhi fangfa), disparities in social power and rights (quanli), women's political participation, and marriage.