Looking back over the past hundred years in China, some ten women are seen to have become the chief historical figures of their sex. I have known personally six of these.

Two were the famous pioneer women writers. Ping Hsin, born in 1900,was a friend and neighbor at Yenching University in Peking in 1934-1935;she wrote her own story and sent it to me from Japan. Ting Ling, born in1906, told me her autobiography.

The China Society for People's Friendship Studies (PFS) in cooperation with the Foreign Languages Press (FLP) in Beijing has arranged for republication, in the series entitled Light on China, of some fifty bookswritten in English between the 1860s and the founding years of the People's Republic, by journalistic and other sympathetic eyewitnesses of the revo lutionary events described. Most of these books have long been out of print,but are now being brought back to life for the benefit of readers in China and abroad.

PREFACE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE EMANCIPATION OF CHINESE WOMEN

  From the Taipings to the 191l Revolution

  From the May Fourth Movement in 1919 to the Communes

WOMEN AND THE FAMILY

  Sociology in China

  Marriage, Divorce and Property Rights

  Legal Status

  The Organization of Women since 1949

WOMEN AND CHRISTIANITY

The Protestant Reformation

Madame Feng Yu-hsiang, Minister of Public Health

WOMEN AND KUOMINTANG

Ch'iu Chin

  Madame Liao Chung-kai, Director of Overseas

 Chinese Affairs

  The Soong Daughters

  Madame Sun Yat-sen

  Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Madame H. H. Kung

WOMEN AND EDUCATION

  The Literary Field

  A Writer: Ping Hsin

  Ting Ling, Novelist

  Writing and Revolution

BOUND FEET AND STRAW SANDALS

  Autobiographies of Communist Women

  Tsai Ch'ang and Hsiang Chin-yu

  The Student Migration to France, 1920

  Nineteen Twenty-Seven

  The Revolutionary Pair Tsai Ho-sheng and Hsiang Chin-yu

  Hsiang Chin-yii and the Women's Movement

  Teng Ying-chao, the Wife of Chou En-lai

GLOSSARY