Michael Ng
NAN NÜ, Men, Women and Gender in China
Published online: August 2026
Abstract: This article explores “the battle of the sexes” in the modernizing Chinese home during the late 1920s and 1930s, drawing evidence from discussions published in the commercial periodical press. It examines how Chinese masculinity and Chinese husband-hood were molded by new ideas about women’s roles as wives worthy of equal respect within the modern family structures emerging during these years. Inspired by the feminist movement and empowered by their new legal rights under the Civil and Criminal Code pertaining to marriage, divorce, and adultery, women began to openly and enthusiastically discuss how to choose a husband, the criteria of a model husband, and how to be a good wife. The article shows that for many women, the model husband was not the man who emancipated his wife from her household duties and facilitated her independent participation in economic activities and public affairs. Rather, some Republican women of the 1920s and 1930s modified the notions of “equality” and “independence” and reinvented them as a more conservative vision of “interdependent equality.” These women were re-embracing their traditional domestic duties and justifying their financial dependence on their husbands within the rubric of “interdependent equality.” Simultaneously, men, sometimes and somewhat ironically, invoked gender equality to regain some of the status they thought they had lost, appealing for public sympathy through ironic cartoons and magazine articles. The article shows that equality between husbands and wives had become ingrained in public social, political, and legal discourse and in ordinary urbanites’ consciousness such that neither group wanted to disregard the principle even while they mobilized it for different ends and in different ways.
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