question". In November 1919, Miss Zhao’s suicide sparked cultural debate regarding the role of modern women in social and political life. A woman forced into an arranged marriage by her family, Miss Zhao, committed suicide by cutting her throat while being transported to the house of her would-be husband. The formerly routine occurrence of a woman’s suicide to avoid arranged marriage became an important center of debate for Chinese feminists. Feminist commentators included Mao Zedong who published nine newspaper articles about the suicide and the need to overhaul societal norms relating to women. Simultaneously, Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House was newly-translated and being performed in Shanghai. The example of the play’s Nora further fueled radical intellectuals and the discussion of women’s roles in China. Professor Lin Chun writes that "Women's liberation had been highlighted in the communist agenda from the outset, and, in that sense, the Chinese revolution was simultaneously a women's revolution, and Chinese socialism a women's cause." By the 1920s, the Communist movement in China used a labor and peasant organizing strategy that combined workplace advocacy with women's rights advocacy. The Communists would lead union organizing efforts among male workers while simultaneously working in nearby peasant communities on women's rights issues, including literacy for women. Mao Zedong and Yang Kaihui were among the most effective Communist political organizers using this method. During the White Terror that began with the Shanghai Massacre by the Kuomintang against the Communists, the Kuomintang specifically targeted women perceived as non-traditional. Kuomintang forces presumed that women who had short hair and whom had not been subjected to the practice of foot binding were radicals. Kuomintang forces cut their breasts off, shaved their heads, and displayed their mutilated corpses to cow the populace. In the Chinese Civil War, the Communists enacted women's rights measures in areas of the country they controlled. In the revolutionary base area of Jiangxi, the CCP-led authorities enacted the Marriage Regulations of 1931 and the Marriage Laws of 1941, which were modeled after Soviet Union statutes. These statutes declared marriage as a free association between a woman and a man without the interference of other parties and permitted divorce on mutual agreement. At the time, they were the most progressive marriage laws in China and created the conditions for women to divorce men they had been forced to marry, leave abusive spouses, and till their own land. Developments in the