One of the most basic problems in studying ordinary women of this period is the lack of first hand information. While in traditional China some women were admired for their poetic skills, most ordinary women were illiterate and unable to tell their own stories. Material left from the New Culture period is biased in favour of the progressive younger generation, and shows relatively little of what the dramatic changes meant to older women. While considerable research has been done on women writers of this period, the same cannot be said of women without a voice of their own, and the lack of research material is a major factor. To tackle this problem, I propose to draw information from a little studied source: the life stories of women married to leading literary men. While this limits my investigation primarily to the middle and gentry classes, it does offer a window on how women of different ages and backgrounds fared in this period of unprecedented normative changes. In adopting a case-studies approach I hope to reveal how such changes affected women's lives on a personal level, as well as present different angles on the New Woman identity. The women discussed in this paper are Zhu An and Xu Guangping (married to Lu Xun), and Zhang Youyi and Lu Xiaoman (married to Xu Zhimo).