Abstract
The Taiwanese female author Chang, Man-Chuan has been seen as a writer of popular literature, focused on household affairs and everyday trivia with little to say about women’s issues. She has, however, used her never-married self as an example to reflect deeply on issues confronting women in Taiwan who choose to remain single. In this thesis, careful examination of her collected works on prose and interviews reveals the emphasis she puts on “Love Oneself First” and demonstrates that in both the quantity and quality of her prose, her commitment to the cause of women being able to choose their own lifestyles is unsurpassed. By exploring the life of her own as a never-married woman, Chang, Man-Chuan has attacked traditional stereotypes toward single women and awakened women throughout Taiwan to new possibilities in the search of one’s own life meaning. Therefore, she is well-deserved to be seen as an “awakener” for single women in Taiwan. Offering new topics and directions for women’s writing in Taiwan, Chang, Man-Chuan’s “lower-case feminism” is a welcome complement to more strident forms of feminist resistance in literature produced in Taiwan.