Progressive or Immoral: Representations of the Modern Girl in Print Media of 1930s Taiwan

Abstract

Print media in 1930s Taiwan played an important mediating role in representing womanhood. This paper analyses the diverse representations of the modern girl in selected literary works from three print media: the women’s magazine Taiwan Women’s World, the Taiwan New People’s News’ literary column, and the modern Taiwanese writers’ coterie journal Taiwan bungei. It will first examine “modern girl” as a discursive term during early 20th century East Asia. It then discusses the glamorous high-heel wearers and pitiful streetwalkers in Taiwan Women’s World, the refashioning of the concept “xianqi liangmu” (wise wife and good mother) in Taiwan New People’s News, and how the term “modern girl” is appropriated as an object of the bourgeois male’s gaze in Taiwan bungei. It argues “modern girl” is cast recurrently between artificial progress and immoral antagonism, and this storyline makes the modern girl a trope of the male authors’ self-portraiture or ambivalence towards modernity.