"This book develops a new approach to historical change at the turn of the twentieth century, a crucial stage in the unfolding of Chinese modernity. Its focus is on the fraught and momentous woman question, which foregrounded the cultural paradoxes and political aspirations that define the era. Judge probes Chinese approaches to their own past and the modern West (mediated via Japan) through a close examination of the varied cultural and political uses of female biography - a genre with a 2,000 year history in China and a new political salience in the early twentieth century. She analyses the ways a range of male and female actors approached historical Chinese and modern Western women's biographies to promote competing visions of female virtue, talent, and heroism - and by extension, to advance competing evaluations of China's ritual teachings, cultural heritage, and national future. Judge cogently maps these various approaches and establishes a new hermeneutics of historical change. At the same time, she highlights disjunctions among representations of exemplary heroines and between such representations and women's actual lives by ending each chapter with a methodologically innovative counterpoint. Excavating traces of the often highly mediated experience of China's first generation of female political activists, overseas students, schoolteachers, and public writers, she questions the ways long-standing and newly defined gender categories took on - or failed to take on - efficacy in women's everyday lives. Judge concludes by evaluating how women's issues continue to illuminate Chinese understandings of the past, the West, and the nation at the turn of the twenty-first century."--BOOK JACKET.