The New Woman Commits Suicide: The Press, Cultural Memory, and the New Republic

Goodman examines a controversy concerning the suicide of Xi Shangzhen, a woman in 1920's Shanghai who hanged herself in the office of her employer, Tang Jiezhi, a well-known May Fourth activist in business and journalistic circles. Her close reading of newspaper accounts which discuss the case show ways in which it served as a flashpoint for discussions about morality and money and the ways that those discussions were intertwined in Shanghai in the early Republican period.