By the 1930s, many women in Shanghai had broken with traditional modes of female conduct that for the most part kept women at home. With Western influences sparking the urge to "modernize" China at the beginning of the 1900s, women partook in Shanghai's merrymaking at dance halls, restaurants, and theaters.
A curator at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco writes on the museum's blog that 1930s advertisements depicted "an ideal of the modern woman in Shanghai: she was fashionable in appearance, she was … adept in the home and in social occasions, she projected confidence and composure."
Virtual Cities Project/Institut d'Asie Orientale
