Analyzes how turn-of-the-twentieth-century male and female writers, educators, and activists reinterpreted both historical Chinese and modern Western women's biographies to promote their divergent visions of womanhood and nationhood.

This book develops a new approach to historical change at the turn of the twentieth century, a crucial stage in the unfolding of Chinese modernity. Its focus is on the fraught and momentous woman question, which foregrounded the cultural paradoxes and political aspirations that define the era. Judge probes Chinese approaches to their own past and the modern West (mediated via Japan) through a close examination of the varied cultural and political uses of female biography--a genre with a 2,000-year history in China and a new political salience in the early twentieth century.

"This fascinating new book strips away scholarly illusions about ruptures in China's nineteenth and early-twentieth century history, and reveals how new roles for women have deep roots in a dense textual and cultural past. The illustrations are nothing short of fabulous."