In bars tucked away in alleys and at salons and bookstores around Shanghai, women are debating their place in a country where men make the laws.

在位于上海僻静里弄的酒吧里，在沙龙和书店里，这些女性争论她们在一个由男性制定法律的国家中的地位。

Some wore wedding gowns to take public vows of commitment to themselves. Others gathered to watch films made by women about women. The bookish flocked to female bookshops to read titles like “The Woman Destroyed” and “Living a Feminist Life.”

有些人穿着婚纱公开发誓这辈子献给自己。也有些人聚在一起观看女性制作的关于女性的电影。爱读书的人则在女性书店阅读《破碎的女人》(The Woman Destroyed)、《过一种女性主义的生活》(Living a Feminist Life)等书。

Women in Shanghai, and some of China’s other biggest cities, are negotiating the fragile terms of public expression at a politically precarious moment. China’s ruling Communist Party has identified feminism as a threat to its authority. Female rights activists have been jailed. Concerns about harassment and violence against women are ignored or outright silenced.

在上海和中国其他一些大城市，女性正在探索存在政治危险的当下公开表达的不确定方式。中国执政的共产党已将女权主义视为对其权威的威胁。女权活动人士被关进监狱。有关针对女性的骚扰和暴力的担忧被忽视或干脆被彻底压制。

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has diminished the role of women at work and in public office. There are no female members of Mr. Xi’s inner circle or the Politburo, the executive policymaking body. He has invoked more traditional roles for women, as caretakers and mothers, in planning a new “childbearing culture” to address a shrinking population.

中国领导人习近平已削弱了女性在职场上和政府中的作用。中共决策机构政治局中没有女性，政治局是习近平的核心圈子。他提倡传统的女性角色，提倡女性去养儿育女、照顾老人，为应对中国人口萎缩问题提出了“培育新型婚育文化”的计划。

But groups of women around China are quietly reclaiming their own identities. Many are from a generation that grew up with more freedom than their mothers. Women in Shanghai, profoundly shaken by a two-month Covid lockdown in 2022, are being driven by a need to build community.

但中国各地的女性群体正在不动声色地找回自己的身份认同。其中许多人是在比她们母亲有过的更自由的环境中长大的。2022年，长达两个月的新冠封城让一些上海女性深感震惊，让她们有了必须建立社区的动力。

“I think everyone living in this city seems to have reached this stage that they want to explore more about the power of women,” said Du Wen, the founder of Her, a bar that hosts salon discussions.

“我觉得生活在这座城市的所有人好像已进入了这个阶段，她们要更多地探索女性的力量，”Her吧的创始人杜雯（音）说，她在自己的酒吧里举办沙龙讨论。

Her吧是上海一家自我描述为女权主义的酒吧，女性聚在那里谈论她们在社会中的地位。

Frustrated by the increasingly narrow understanding of women by the public, Nong He, a film and theater student, held a screening of three documentaries about women by female Chinese directors.

公众对女性的理解日益狭隘，电影和戏剧专业的学生何农（音）对此感到沮丧，她举办了一场放映活动，播放了三部由中国女性导演拍摄的有关女性的纪录片。

“I think we should have a broader space for women to create,” Ms. He said. “We hope to organize such an event to let people know what our life is like, what the life of other women is like, and with that understanding, we can connect and provide some help to each other.”

“我觉得我们应该为女性提供更广阔的创造空间，”何女士说。“我们希望通过组织这种活动，让人们了解我们的生活是什么样的，其他女性的生活是什么样的。有了这种了解，我们能建立联系，相互提供一些帮助。”

At quietly advertised events, women question misogynistic tropes in Chinese culture. “Why are lonely ghosts always female?” one woman recently asked, referring to Chinese literature’s depiction of homeless women after death. They share tips for beginners to feminism. Start with history, said Tang Shuang, the owner of Paper Moon, which sells books by female authors. “This is like the basement of the structure.”

在这些低调推出的活动中，女性对中国文化中的厌女主题提出了质疑。“为什么孤魂野鬼总是女性？”一名女子在最近一次活动中问道，她指的是中国文学中对死后无家可归的妇女的描述。她们与女权主义入门者分享窍门。从历史开始，Paper Moon书店的主人唐霜说，这家店销售女性作家的作品。“这就像建筑物的地下室。”

There are few reliable statistics about gender violence and sexual harassment in China, but incidents of violence against women have occurred with greater frequency, according to researchers and social workers. Stories have circulated widely online of women being physically maimed or brutally murdered for trying to leave their husbands, or savagely beaten for resisting unwanted attention from men. The discovery of a woman who was chained inside a doorless shack in the eastern province of Jiangsu became one of the most debated topics online in years.

虽然中国关于性别暴力和性骚扰的可靠统计数据很少，但研究人员和社会工作者说，针对女性的暴力事件已越来越频繁地发生。网上广泛流传着女性因试图与丈夫离婚遭家暴致残、或被残忍杀害，或因拒绝男性的骚扰被野蛮殴打的故事。有人在江苏发现一名女性被锁在一间无门棚屋中的事情成了网上多年来讨论最激烈的话题之一。

With each case, the reactions have been highly divisive. Many people denounced the attackers and called out sexism in society. Many others blamed the victims.

对所有这些故事的反应都存在很大的分歧。许多人谴责肇事者，批评社会上的性别歧视。也有不少人指责受害者。

The way these discussions polarize society unnerved Ms. Tang, an entrepreneur and former deputy editor of Vogue China. Events in her own life unsettled her, too. As female friends shared feelings of shame and worthlessness for not getting married, Ms. Tang searched for a framework to articulate what she was feeling.

这些讨论导致的社会两极分化让身为企业家的唐霜感到不安，她曾任《Vogue》中国版前副出版人。她本人生活中发生的事情也让她感到不舒服。当女性朋友分享因为未婚而感到羞耻和自卑时，唐霜开始寻找一个框架来表达她的感受。

唐霜在自己的上海书店Paper Moon。

“Then I found out, you know, even myself, I don’t have very clear thoughts about these things,” she said. “People are eager to talk, but they don’t know what they are talking about.” Ms. Tang decided to open Paper Moon, a store for intellectually curious readers like herself.

“后来我发现，你知道，就连我本人对这些事情也没有非常清晰的想法，”她说。“人们渴望交谈，但她们不知道自己在谈什么。”唐霜决定为那些像自己这样有求知欲的读者开办Paper Moon书店。

The bookstore is divided into an academic section that features feminist history and social studies, as well as literature and poetry. There is an area for biographies. “You need to have some real stories to encourage women,” Ms. Tang said.

书店里有以女权主义历史和社会学研究为主题的学术书籍区，也有文学作品和诗集，以及摆满了传记的书架。“需要有一些真实的故事来鼓励女性，”唐霜说。

Anxiety about attracting the wrong kind of attention is always present.

担心把错误的注意力吸引来的焦虑始终存在。

When Ms. Tang opened her store, she placed a sign in the door describing it as a feminist bookstore that welcomed all genders, as well as pets. “But my friend warned me to take it out because, you know, I could cause trouble by using the word feminism.”

唐霜刚开店时，店门口曾挂过一个牌子，把书店描述为一家女权主义书店，同时欢迎所有性别的顾客，也欢迎宠物。“但我的朋友警告我把牌子摘掉，因为你知道，使用女权主义这个词可能会给我带来麻烦。”

Wang Xia, the owner of Xin Chao Bookstore, has chosen to stay away from the “F” word altogether. Instead she described her bookstore as “woman-themed.” When she opened it in 2020, the store was a sprawling space with nooks to foster private conversations and six study rooms named after famous female authors like Simone de Beauvoir.

馨巢书屋的老板王霞选择根本不提“女权”。她把自己的书店描述为“以女性为主题”。她的店2020年开业时，店里空间很大，有方便私人交谈的角落，还有六间以著名女作家（比如波伏娃）命名的书房。

Xin Chao Bookstore served more than 50,000 people through events, workshops and online lectures, Ms. Wang said. It had more than 20,000 books about art, literature and self-improvement — books about women and books for women. The store became so prominent that state-owned media wrote about it and the Shanghai government posted the article on its website.

王霞说，馨巢书屋通过各种活动、研讨会和在线讲座，曾为5万多人提供过服务。店里有两万多本关于艺术、文学和自我提升的书籍，都是关于女性、为女性而写的书籍。这家书店曾变得如此引人注目，以至于官方媒体对它进行了报道，上海市政府还在其网站上转载了那篇文章。

王霞（左）在她位于上海书城的馨巢书屋空间。

Still, Ms. Wang was careful to steer clear of making a political statement. “My ambition is not to develop feminism,” she said.

尽管如此，王霞还是小心翼翼地绕开涉及政治的表示。 “我的目的不是发展女权主义，”她说。

For Ms. Du, the Her founder, empowering women is at the heart of her motivation. She was jolted into action by the isolation of the pandemic: Shanghai ordered its residents to stay in their apartments under lockdown for two months, and her world narrowed to the walls of her apartment.

对Her吧创始人杜女士来说，让女性更主动地掌握自己的命运是她动机的核心。上海曾在疫情期间下令民众居家长达两个月之久，将她的世界缩小到公寓的墙壁内，这种隔离使她受到震惊，让她立即行动起来。

For years she dreamed of opening a place where she could elevate the voices of women, and now it seemed more urgent than ever. After the lockdown, she opened Her, a place where women could strike friendships and debate the social expectations that society had placed on them.

好多年前，她就曾梦想开设一个能提高女性声音的地方，现在，这似乎比以往任何时候都要迫切。封城结束后，她开设了Her吧，让女性能在那里交朋友，讨论社会对她们的期待。

On International Women’s Day in March, Her held an event it called Marry Me, in which women took vows to themselves. The bar has also hosted a salon where women acted out the roles of mothers and daughters. Many younger women described a reluctance to be treated the way their mothers were treated and said they did not know how to talk to them, Ms. Du said.

今年3月8日的国际妇女节那天，她举办了一场名为“嫁我”的活动，女性在活动上发誓这辈子献给自己。酒吧还举办过一个沙龙，让女性扮演母亲和女儿的角色。许多年轻女性表示，不愿意被人像对待她们母亲那样对待自己，还说她们不知道如何与母亲交谈，杜女士说。

The authorities have met with Ms. Du and indicated that as long as the events at Her didn’t become too popular, there was a place for it in Shanghai, she said.

有关部门找过杜女士，并表示，只要Her吧的活动不要太受欢迎，上海就有容纳它的空间，杜女士说。

But in China, there is always the possibility that officials will crack down. “They never tell you clearly what is forbidden,” Ms. Tang of Paper Moon said.

但在中国，总有遭到官员压制的可能性。“他们从来不都清楚地告诉你什么是不允许的，”Paper Moon的唐霜说。

上海的女性书店Paper Moon。

Ms. Wang recently moved Xin Chao Bookstore into Shanghai Book City, a famous store with large atriums and long columns of bookcases. A four-volume collection of Mr. Xi’s writings are prominently displayed in several languages.

王霞最近把馨巢书屋搬到了上海书城。书城有一个摆满了高高的书柜的大中庭。四卷本习近平选集的多种语言版本展示在书城的显著位置上。

Book City is huge. The space for Xin Chao Bookstore is not, Ms. Wang said, with several shelves inside and around a small room that may eventually hold about only 3,000 books.

书城很大。但馨巢书屋的空间不大，王霞说，只是书城里面的一个小房间，房间里摆着几个书架，最终也许只能放约3000本书。

“It’s a small cell of the city, a cultural cell,” Ms. Wang said.

“这是城市的一个小细胞，一个文化细胞，”王霞说。

Still, it stands out in China.

尽管如此，它在中国仍很显眼。

“Not every city has a woman’s bookstore,” she said. “There are many cities that do not have such cultural soil.”

“并不是每个城市都有女性书店，”她说。“有很多城市没有这种文化土壤。”