Chinese women fighting in the 1930s By brianlkennedy - Sun, 10 Jun 2007 02:18:26 GMT
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I found this photo when I was working on an article for
Classical Fighting Arts magazine on the Jing Wu Association and thought it might be of interest. It is a picture taken in China in 1934 of two Chinese female fighters getting ready to "get busy" with the gloves.
What it actually is, is a National Guo Shu match. As part of the Nationalist Government plan to make a stronger, more modern China, they sponsored a nationwide martial arts program (that included womens programs) and as part of that there were city, county, provincial and national matches held.
The idea of Chinese women getting the gloves on and getting busy in the ring is still alive and well. I went to see a friend of mine fight in a boxing tourney held up in Taipei awhile back and there were a fair number of high school and college women fighting.
And this idea of Chinese women being suitable for contact martial sports started with the Jing Wu Associations (
精武体育会). The Jing Wu was the first major public martial arts training organization in China. They were the first training organization to target middle class urbanites and they were the first to give women’s martial arts training equal attention. And in a broad sense they were the first to put martial arts forward as a form of “recreation” for adults. The association was a privately created and privately funded group that was established in Shanghai in 1909.
An important aspect of the Jing Wu’s new approach was to put women’s martial arts programs on an equal footing with men’s programs. The Mulin cartoon and the femmes fatales of the sword epics aside, the reality was that martial arts was considered an utterly inappropriate pursuit for women in traditional China and with some very rare exceptions martial arts was “men only”. The Jing Wu attempted to reverse this reality and place the women’s martial arts programs on an equal footing with the mens’.
The Jing Wu women’s program got started in 1917 and within a year the women’s program was operating in several schools in Shanghai. The Jing Wu’s anniversary book contains a number of essays by women involved in the Jing Wu program and the general theme of the essays is that in the new, modern, scientific China; women can and should participate in all activities and that their gender is not a bar to physical development, including martial arts development. And the thing that needs to be underscored, and the thing that was remarkable about the Jing Wu’s women’s martial arts program, was the fact that it was not a token effort or some kind of “window dressing”. The women’s martial arts program was every bit as serious and real as the men’s program. Women participated in the full range of martial arts training including sparring and weapons work.
Take care,
Brian
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