As one of the three major branches of women’s movement in China’s cities, urban female workers in 1920s fought for their public voices, raised their visibility and then became one of the two indications of the history of women's movement in modern China (Li, 2015). They started to walk out from their homes and take the job of waitress to serve in teahouse rather than of babysitting, in textile industry or prostitution, challenging the long-existing male hegemony and holding high expectations of feminine liberation attained from the New Culture Movement of advocating science and democracy. While the existing scholarship on China's teahouse waitress of 1920s historically reviewed the relevant press coverage and emphasizes the contradiction between male and female, the suppressed and the authority, the identity and subsequent issues of working women in societal and individual views, and the ostensible mismatch between waitress as an occupation and accusation of their indecency in dressing and behaviors, this paper scrutinizes the varied records particularly newspapers reports on Shun Pao, Yangcheng News, Shanghai’s Republican Daily, Yinwu News and etc. during 1920s and draws attention to the inconsistency in women’s call for occupation rights in waitressing and teahouse owners’ “teasing” and publicizing stigmatized female figure by employing qualitative textual analysis.
Thus, it argues an novel perspective into the social understanding and acceptance/rejection of women’s occupation. Women can be waitresses, however it cannot be denied that that some teahouses owners were abusing the female figure with “obscene language” and “requirements on their dressing”, and a part of prostitutes using it as a cover for their illegal businesses. The concept of liberty and equality brought by New Culture Movement are well acquainted to the extent of admitting female employment’s legitimacy and debating for the societal betterment of their demands, which sets start for feminism in China (Tian, 2015). The identity and the individuality of “being women” are addressed in modernism contexts and female subjective experience became visible. It can be applicable to decode the Third Wave Feminism affected by social internet and cultural pluralism and understand the current critiquing on feminism over sex differentiation, the overwhelmed otherness in post-modernism context, and the reflexivity on essentialism and meta-narratives in and beyond China.