On the Question of Women's Liberation
[6] Others maintain that He-Yin Zhen's awareness of the interconnectedness of class, foreign-imperial, and gender-based oppression, as well as her commitment to a fundamental political and economic restructuring of society, places her squarely in an anarcha-feminist ideology.
[10] Western imperialism in trade and foreign relations, the upheaval of China's dynastic system, and the spread of enlightenment thinking and free-market capitalism were among the social, political, and economic developments around the time of the work's publication.
In addition, rising competition with tariff-protected foreign industrial imports and mechanization adversely affected many Chinese women who relied on home-based textile and handicraft manufacturing for household financial stability.
[13] In this and other works, He-Yin Zhen elected to hyphenate her last name, including her mother's maiden name He as part of her belief that the patrilineal surname was a function of patriarchal oppression.
[16] This is achieved through "political and moral institutions" including religious rituals and cultural practices that construct and separate the categories of "man" (nanxing) and "woman" (nüxing).
[17] He-Yin refers to Confucian traditions in The Book of Rites including marriage customs and the practice of cloistering as several such institutions that enforce unequal social relations.
As Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl, and Dorothy Ko propose, the concept of nannü can be interpreted as an "analytical category" or lens through which to understand the situation and status of woman in the past and present.
Within the system of nannü, the status of woman can be understood in He-Yin Zhen's writings as an effect or outcome of unequal treatment, differing access to education, and confinement to the domestic sphere.
[16] He-Yin Zhen argues that both the inequality between men and women in society as well as the very existence of the categories "man" and "woman" themselves are not the result of nature but of differing treatment.
Through the analytical category of nannü, He-Yin Zhen created a way of understanding women's' unequal social position and proposed a radical rethinking of gender that came well before similar poststructuralist feminist theorists.
"[23] She proposed first that women's liberation served as a means of gaining power and authority for Chinese male intellectuals through an appeal to newly popular "civilized" European standards.
He-Yin Zhen pointed to men's self-interested desire to escape the responsibility of providing for the household as another motive behind "passive" calls for women's liberation.
She reflected on the election of Social Democrats to parliaments across Europe, and claimed that these parties had failed to bring economic reforms and enact change for the common people whom they represented.
[29] Applying this situation to women, He-Yin Zhen argued that it is, therefore, possible for progressive individuals and parties to become forces of oppression within parliamentary politics.
[31] These reforms, which suffragists in Europe and America failed to enact, were in He-Yin Zhen's view the only path to true liberation for women and men of all classes.
