On the Question of Women’s Liberation: Family, Labour and Anarchist Feminism

He-Yin Zhen’s On the Question of Women’s Liberation appeared around 1907 in Tianyi, an anarchist journal. The surviving text can be dated to 1907, but the evidence does not establish a month or day. That restraint about precision also helps situate the essay: it is not an abstract philosophical treatise detached from political organising, but an intervention in late-Qing debates about what women’s liberation should mean. He-Yin does not stop at asking whether women may receive education, enter occupations or gain particular legal rights. She asks how the family, property, labour and the state together produce a social order of male domination.

The essay’s radical force lies in refusing to equate entry into existing institutions with freedom. If economic life still depends on women’s unpaid or undervalued labour, marriage continues to place women’s bodies and lives under others’ control, and state law protects those arrangements, then more schooling or employment may improve some women’s circumstances without changing the underlying relations of power. He-Yin returns relationships called “private” to the economic and political structures that shape them. Women’s liberation becomes a question about how institutions distribute labour, resources and autonomy, not merely about individual virtue or moral reform.

The essay shifts attention from reform agendas centred on national survival or strength to the household power relations they may leave intact. If political change leaves domestic patriarchy and women’s labour as an unchanged background, women may remain objects or instruments of reform rather than participants in deciding society’s direction. This does not make national and women’s liberation inevitably opposed. It asks what relations of power a political transformation actually changes. He-Yin’s anarchist position takes her analysis beyond a demand for the state to admit women more fairly: it questions how the state, law and property relations themselves sustain domination.

Readers today should retain critical distance as well. Some of the essay’s discussion of sexuality and prostitution uses moralizing judgments. Its sharp critique of patriarchy does not erase those tensions, and the text should not be equated with contemporary sex-worker-rights positions. Columbia University Press’s translated and scholarly collection situates He-Yin in the history of transnational feminist thought; readers can distinguish the original argument, the editors’ interpretation and present-day analysis. Read it beside Qiu Jin’s “An Address to Two Hundred Million Fellow Countrywomen.” Both are late-Qing women’s political writing, but they articulate different routes to liberation: Qiu connects women’s self-reliance to national crisis, while He-Yin further interrogates the patriarchal foundations of state and society. Comparison does not imply that they shared a position or influenced one another.

Primary text and further reading

• Chinese text of “On the Question of Women’s Liberation”
• Columbia University Press, The Birth of Chinese Feminism: translation, editorial scholarship and bibliographic details
• Archive introduction to Tianyi and He-Yin Zhen
• Further reading: Qiu Jin, “An Address to Two Hundred Million Fellow Countrywomen”