Writing Women into the Constitution: Gendered Citizenship and Reproductive Autonomy in Republican China

This article reinterprets the constitutional history of Republican China by foregrounding women as active participants in constitution-making and critique. While the Guomindang (KMT) portrayed constitutions as instruments to conclude the Nationalist Revolution, proclaiming gender equality as already achieved and subsuming women’s rights under nationalist and eugenic imperatives, feminist actors engaged constitutional discourse as a strategic arena for political struggle. Drawing on writings, petitions, and debates from the 1930s to the 1940s, the article shows how women transformed reproductive labor, maternal welfare, and birth control into constitutional questions central to the meaning of citizenship. Through birth control clinics, Women’s Constitutional Research Associations, and lobbying for quotas, equal pay, maternity protections, and property rights, feminists treated the constitution not as a fixed text but as an opportunity to reshape institutional design and challenge structures that perpetuated gendered exclusion. Their critiques exposed the biopolitical logics embedded in eugenic policy, marriage regulation, and maternalist ideology, while their proposals articulated a competing vision of constitutionalism that sought to use legal reform as leverage for broader transformation. Situating the Chinese case alongside global examples of bottom-up constitutional engagement, the article argues that women’s activism produced a distinctly gendered form of popular constitutionalism. It highlights both the possibilities and limits of pursuing equality through constitutional reform within an ascendant party-state and underscores the enduring tension between constitutional governance and women’s reproductive autonomy.