He-Yin Zhen’s Women’s Manifesto (1907)

In her 1907 Women’s Manifesto, He-Yin Zhen examines four domains of inequality: marriage, family standing, assigned duties and ritual. A wife takes her husband’s surname, faces limits on public activity and owes forms of mourning determined by her place in the family. The examples show how ordinary practices can make dependence appear to be a moral duty.

Where does the work of care go?

The manifesto proposes equal upbringing, education and occupational opportunities. Public nurseries would take on childcare that would otherwise fall on individual women. Access to work thus depends on the social organisation of care. In its closing argument, upbringing and habit also explain differences attributed to sex, making those differences open to change.

What a surname or a mourning garment makes visible

The discussion of adopting a husband’s surname and the discussion of mourning rules appear in separate parts of the manifesto. A name determines how a woman is publicly identified after marriage. The relative weight of mourning duties tells the living which side of a family commands greater obligations. Read together, the examples make an abstract hierarchy outwardly legible. He-Yin Zhen first proposes joining both parents’ surnames and then imagines abolishing surnames after a revolution. The two proposals operate on different time horizons.

The manifesto later stages an objection: childbirth and childrearing, the imagined reader argues, prevent women from taking on the same social work as men. He-Yin Zhen’s answer takes the labour seriously. A publicly provided nursery would put it somewhere else in the social order. The closing argument traces gendered capacities back to upbringing and habit. Returning from there to the marriage proposals reveals the tension between dismantling family authority and using punishment and public condemnation to enforce a particular sexual order.

The manifesto combines this argument with severe moral and punitive prescriptions about marriage. That tension gives readers a reason to distinguish its institutional insights from the controls it retains. On the Question of Women’s Liberation provides a companion for tracing how particular marital rules relate to He-Yin Zhen’s broader critique of economic dependence.

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