Abstract

Culturally conditioned differences between women must be seen and theorized about in order to avoid essentialist generalizations about “women’s issues.” In this context, the idea of a universal patriarchal order is questioned, as is the idea of a general, universally equivalent type of feminism. Through analysis of the political philosophy of He Zhen (1884–circa 1920), this paper aims to present a Chinese alternative to liberal feminism based on the assumption that the Western feminist movement might not be a suitable means of abolishing women’s oppression in China, because it is culturally conditioned and rooted in the particulars of Western social history.