“At first, Guizhen was in the public school of Zhabei. When she was fourteen years old, she was about to graduate, however, due to some reason, she dropped out of school. From then on, she was unemployed and stayed at home. When she was sixteen years old, Shenxianshijie promoted feminism and also admired her name, and hired her to be a waitress.” 1
— Xiao Yan, “Kuaile Shijie”.
The above paragraph is quoted from a story published in Kuaile shijie (Happy World) which was a newspaper established in Shanghai in 1927. The story is about two waitresses Wu Guizhen and He Zhenbao who worked for Shenxian Shijie, a cabaret. In the story of Wu, the author mentions that she was hired because Shenxian Shijie promoted feminism. Also, after she started to work for the cabaret, Wu was able to make twenty five yuan a month, in addition to the amount of tip she earned is the double of the fixed salary. Therefore, the whole family of Wu relied on her income.2 The way the author phrased the life story of Wu implies the existence of feminist elements in her choice of work and the cabaret. However, the real life of the hostesses and waitresses may suggest the opposite. This newly appeared gender dynamic due to the appearance of a new gender interaction brought by cabarets and dance halls between males and females created a hallucination of the rise of feminism in Shanghai in the 1930s. This new gender dynamic could be viewed as a new extended form of the traditional male and female power dynamic outside of the domestic sphere, and the existence of the element of feminism which Kuaile shijie observed in the life stories of these two waitresses is questionable.
One of the reasons why there was considered to be a rising trend of feminism in Shanghai was because of the appearance and popularisation of cabarets and dance halls which created more job opportunities for women and a new form of gender relation which did not exist in China before the 1920s. The former is not hard to understand, just like the author of Kuaile shijie described that the whole family of Wu relied on her income, which somehow won women a more important status in their family. This new economic advantage of women also seems to lift the social status of women in the early half of the twentieth century in Shanghai. The latter requires more explanation. Dance halls and cabarets created a space where males and females could establish an intimate relationship without the intervention of senior family members which is unprecedented in Chinese society. The dance halls and cabarets were different from conventional prostitution and brothels. Hostesses and waitresses had more publicity and fame. Then when men went to cabaret, they did not simply seek sexual consumption. As Andrew Field argued in his book Shanghai’s Dancing World, male patrons sometimes do not aim for sexual activity while ‘courting’ a hostess. They use many ways, including treating her to dinner, taking her out to a show, or buying her gifts, to establish a relationship with the hostess.3 On a superficially level, it seems that a famous and influential hostess gained the power which could attract men to please her and somehow reversed the conventional gender structure of society.
This new gender relation brought by the appearance of the cabaret created the impression that feminism was rising and developing in Shanghai. However, it did not dismantle the traditional gender dynamic, because it did not change the underlying unequalness between males and females. The courting practices in a dancehall or a cabaret of a male patron did not imply a superior status of women but rather more explicitly reveal the demand of men to share a consensual experience shared among male patrons that facilitated a male-male relationship in contrast to heterosexual bond.4 Ueno Chizuko expressed a similar point in her book Misogyny that a man, by imitating other males’ sexual desires, becomes the subject in a heterosexual relationship. Having a sexual relationship with females is a way to imitate other males’ sexual desires and a way to be accepted by the group of the male gender.5 Then the practice of courting and ‘winning’ a waitress is a pass for males to enter the world of masculinity.
This demand for affirming one’s masculinity may originate from the fast development and urbanisation of Shanghai as a city that represents modernity where people come together in greater numbers than ever before. City destroyed the traditional social structure and hierarchy of ancient China, in which society was made up of many units of families. Without this traditional familial structure, men lacked the confirmation of traditional masculinity because they no longer played the role of the head of the family. In cities, a new power dynamic is constructed. These institutions were not family-centred, such as administrative institutions, gangs, and large enterprises, in these places, men automatically lost their given superior status in their own families, and the dominant positions were controlled by a limited number of men who might be considered to be the most capable, and in the case of Shanghai by westerners. Therefore, the cabaret and dancehall became a new place to either conspicuously show one’s masculinity or seek reconfirmation of it. Then the underlying narrative of the gender dynamic in a cabaret still objectifies women. The feminism which Shenxianshijie claimed to promote does not exist.