High Heels and Rouge:Crafting the New Woman through Consumption in Linglong Women’s Pictorial Magazine (Linglong funu tuhua zazhi), 1931-1936
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: During the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of China's consumer culture in Shanghai intersected with the nation's attempts to modernize the country economically, ideologically and culturally.The New Woman archetype 新女性, an idealized model of the modern citizen, represented not only an independent, educated woman liberated from Confucian patriarchy, but also China's progression towards the technological and scientific advancement of a Western-defined modernity.This thesis seeks to explore the intersection of Western consumer culture and individualism with China's search for modernity and gender equality.It focuses on the relationship between the New Woman and the consumption of fashionable styles and commodities from 1931 to 1936.To facilitate this exploration, it examines how Linglong Women's Pictorial Magazine 玲瓏婦女圖畫雜誌 (1931-1937) addressed the consumption of fashionable styles and commodities before and during the New Life Movement 新生活運動 (1934-1937), a government-sponsored cultural reform movement that attempted to militarize the country by creating citizens disciplined enough to sacrifice whatever was necessary to protect China from foreign domination or invasion.The purpose of this thesis is to showcase how female consumption patterns created tension between women and the state during the Nationalists' regime (1912-1949).1 Carl Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers: The Experience-Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China, and What They Taught Him (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1937), 36-37. 2 The term Western in this thesis refers to the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany.Although Japan has often been considered an honorary Western nation by some historical scholarship, this thesis chooses to exclude Japan from the category of Western. 3 Carl Crow, Inc. was an advertising agency that flourished in Shanghai during the interwar period, 1918-1937.
Author: Deidryn O Duncan
Institution: The Ohio State University
Language: English
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2243573591