This paper will address the concept of gender and of gender equality (nannü pingdeng 男女平等) in a religious context as it emerges in the writings of men and women of the Republican period, and it will also focus on the creation of a religious public sphere for women in the same period. Further, it will use gender as an analytical tool to explore representations of religion. In the Republican period we see an intensification of the presence of women in the public sphere, the emergence of the concept of nüjie 女界 (woman's realm) and the making of the Chinese "new woman" (xin nüxing 新女性); these new representations and repositioning brought with them intense debates on the role of women in society, of gender differences and of gender equality. This repositioning has been studied in many areas, the literary, poetic, and especially the political, with the emergence of the discourse on women's rights. Religious modernization in the Republican era has also been the focus of much scholarly attention. However, their intersection, the religious dimension of this social repositioning of women has yet to be analyzed in detail, and systematic perspectives on gender and religion are still a marginalized field of study in the West as well as in China. In this article, I look at the writings of Daoist and Buddhist intellectuals and practitioners in order to start outlining and understanding the debates about gender and religion in the public sphere. I analyze how the discourse on women's rights and gender differences is used by religious practitioners and leaders in this period of great historical and cultural change and I argue that, even though many religious leaders supported and in some cases championed women's spiritual equality and their right to participate in religious organizations, women's religious and spiritual emancipation during the early 20th century was closely tied up with China's own emancipation and the wider nationalist agenda, so this effort needs to be seen in the context of a nationalistic discourse. This analysis reveals a concept of gender equality that is complex and shifting, and has different meanings for men and for women.