The primary source I chose is an interview from Wang Zheng’s Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories. In the interview, the interviewee is Zhu Su’e, who used to be an attorney when she was young. The whole book was published in 1999, and Wang Zheng had this interview in 1995. This book was published by University of California Press in California, USA. In addition, I chose this specific interview because the interviewee told her life experience and how she was influenced by the new ideas created in the May Fourth Movement and this connects closely to my topic: the influence of the May Fourth Movement on Chinese Women.

In the interview, Zhu Su’e mentioned that she is the only girl in the family to attend a university. Thanks to her father who is open-minded and held the ideas that girls should also have the same education as boys. All the girls in her family have some kind of education. Zhu Su’e said that she was influenced by both the May Fourth Movement and the things she saw through her live. In some of her relatives’ families, women were either oppressed by their husbands or mothers-in law. Zhu Su’e thought the effective way for a woman to be independent was to have her own career. Independence of women is possible only if they first achieve the economic independence. The new ideas let her realized that the education to high school was not enough for her and she should enter the university. And in order to help to defend women’s rights, and fought for the equality between men and women, she decided to study laws and became an attorney later.Unlike most women at that time, whose destiny were controlled by their parents, Zhu Su’e wanted escape from the control of her family. She did not accept the man that arranged by the family but chose to find the one she really liked. And she had the equal relationship with her husband. However, her sister was not as lucky as Zhu Su’e. She were forced to marry a man even her parents were not satisfied with him. Zhu Su’e is from Changzhou. When the May Fourth Movement broke out, the center of this event moved from Beijing to Shanghai. Therefore, in order to get more advanced idea, Zhu decided to go to Shanghai.

The May Fourth Movement evoked the Chinese women to realize that the importance of women’s independence. In the past, chinese women always appeared as the dependent roles. They depended to their parents and husbands. The society expected them to be the “understanding wife and loving mother” and the traditional view about the education for women was “lacking of learning is a credit to a woman’s virtue”. Women stayed at home all day to take care of the family and the “footbinding”, a tradition that had a long history in China, which is a way that forced women’s feet to be much smaller than the original size. Under the feudal governance, the governors pursued the small sizes of women’s feet as  a sense of beauty. As a result, women need to bind their feet when they were very young and continued binding until there would not be any changes in size. This tradition was not abolished until the establishment of People’s Republic of China in 1949.

In the old time, Chinese women did not have the right to inherit the property of her family. All of the properties were given to sons in the family. One significant social consequence of the May Fourth Movement is the establishment of women’s property rights.

Just like the new ideas let Zhu Su’e realize that only having the education in high school was not enough, the new ideas also encouraged other women to pursue higher education.