During the early Republican years, Chinese women were awakened to the fact that they ought to be independent human beings like men. They began to fight for the chance of getting an education, for their right to inherit the family property, and even for the right to decide their own marriages. Numerous magazines were devoted to the woman issue, with eminent scholars as well as ordinary readers contributing articles discussing a variety of problems concerning women's independence. Emerging in such a cultural milieu, modern Chinese women writers no doubt developed in their writings characteristics that reflected the imprint of their times: the outcry for emancipation, female sexual awakening, the longing for self-improvement, economic independence, and so on. In this paper I try to show how three women writers in the twenties and thirties managed to voice all these desires in their works: Bai Wai (1894-198?), Lu Yin (1899-1934), and Feng Yuanjun (1900-1974). At the peak of their writing careers they aroused as much attention as Bing Xin and Ding Ling. Yet somehow for some reason or other, they were forgotten with the lapse of time. After more than half a century, it is time to "unearth" these three writers who were among the pioneers of the women's liberation movement. The narrative modes they chose to write in, the themes they were concerned about, and the language they used manifest that they were eager to break the bondage that suppressed women's voices as well as their bodies for centuries. Although I by no means pretend to be their biographer, some facts in their lives will be discussed, because their lives, like their writings, did exemplify a generation of women who were fighting for self-liberation.