Two recent books, Jennifer Bond’s Dreaming the New Woman: An Oral History of Missionary Schoolgirls in Republican China and Fang Yu Hu’s Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Taiwanese Girls under Japanese Rule, provide a window onto schoolgirls’ lived experiences of educational reforms on both sides of the Taiwan Strait in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing extensively on oral history, as well as on student publications and educational manifestos, the authors seek to “give voice” to their female subjects while also shedding light on changing roles for women in the home and nation during a pivotal period of East Asian history. Through the lens of oral history, Hu and Bond bring fresh perspectives to the subject of modern women’s education in East Asia, a topic of long-standing scholarly interest dating back to works such as Margaret Burton’s The Education of Women in China (1911). Taken together, the two books make for interesting comparative reading.
Both books track how the ideology of “good wife, wise mother” provided motivation and justification to expand education for girls beyond the home. As Hu explains, the four-character term “good wife, wise mother” (良妻賢母, Japanese ryōsai kenbo) was coined by Japanese educator Nakamura Masanao (1832–1891) in 1875, as a new ideal for modern Japanese women based on the two-character terms “good wife” (良妻) and “wise mother” (賢母) used in Chinese classical texts, but also incorporating Nakamura’s observations of female education and the cult of domesticity in England. “Good wife, wise mother” was thus a hybrid ideology from the start, representing the complex triangulation of ideas among China, Japan, and Western Europe characteristic of this era in East Asian history, as Joan Judge shows in The Precious Raft of History: The Past, The West, and the Woman Question in China (2008). The “good wife, wise mother” was expected to contribute to strengthening the nation through efficient household management and the raising of children with healthy bodies and minds. To produce this new type of female domesticity, Japanese educational reformers crafted a gender-segregated public-school curriculum teaching girls handicrafts, arithmetic, reading, writing, drawing, and singing, as well as ideological values like frugalness, modesty, filial piety, and loyalty to the nation. Framed in Social Darwinian terms, physical education was introduced to build healthy bodies for future “mothers of citizens.” Educational reformers carried these ideas from the metropole to Japan’s colonies of Taiwan and Korea, the former being the subject of Hu’s book. Bond’s work picks up the story of how the “good wife, wise mother” formula entered China, propagated by Japanese educational missionaries and by Chinese students who studied in Japan in the early twentieth century. In its transmission to China, “good wife, wise mother” was reconfigured as “wise wife, good mother” (賢妻良母, Chinese xianqi liangmu), a slogan that would later be attacked by Communists as “feudal,” despite its modern invention.Footnote 1
Good Wife, Wise Mother examines Japan’s implementation of public education in its colony of Taiwan (under Japanese rule between 1895 and 1945), focusing on schooling for Han Taiwanese girls. The book follows the evolution of Japanese policy, beginning with the introduction of the “good wife, wise mother” educational program in 1897, taking us through the years of war mobilization, and ending with an examination of the legacy of Japanese educational reforms for Taiwanese women in the postwar era, and the emergence of colonial nostalgia. In contrast to analyses of the mimetic character of Japanese imperialism in the work of Peter Duus, Robert Eskildsen, Robert Tierney, and others, Hu emphasizes how Japanese colonizers sought to distinguish themselves from European colonizers by casting Japanese imperialism as “benevolent” (6), with educational policy a showcase thereof. Japan thus did more than the European powers to implement universal public primary education in its colonies, Hu asserts, including for girls.
Using oral histories in addition to archival sources, Hu demonstrates how the initial Han Taiwanese resistance to Japanese public schooling for girls gave way to complex responses of adaptation and even collaboration as girls and their families sought to navigate new opportunities along with constraints. Hu asserts that the “good wife, wise mother” program, with its emphasis on feminine virtue and domesticity, played a key role in convincing Han Taiwanese parents to send their daughters to public school. Yet even as colonial schools provided educational opportunities and vocational training for Han Taiwanese girls, there was a cost, Hu contends, as public education was a tool of the colonial assimilation project (doka). Hu argues that doka in Taiwan was heavily gendered, and reinforced gender division and ethnic hierarchy. Hence, while the assimilation policy aimed to make all colonial subjects “Japanese” by teaching Japanese as the “national language” as well as an imperial ethics curriculum, girls were additionally trained to become “good wives, wise mothers” through gender-segregated education. Especially fascinating is the author’s discussion of colonial-era textbooks and the use of Japanese language instruction as a vehicle for producing “good wives, wise mothers” and filial daughters. The new ideal of female domesticity, Hu argues, “was crucial to the civilizing mission of the colonizers” (12). Colonial officials and educators furthermore reinforced an “ethnic and gender hierarchy” (45) by elevating Japanese womanhood as the ideal for Taiwanese girls to emulate, and they used the campaign to eradicate the Han practice of female foot-binding “to emphasize their civilizing mission” (45).
As the first English-language scholarly monograph on the education of Han Taiwanese girls under Japanese rule, Good Wife, Wise Mother contributes to our understanding of women’s history in Taiwan and of Japanese colonialism, complementing in particular the literature on colonial education and the “New Woman” in Korea, such as Theodore Jun Yoo’s The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945 (2008) and Hyaeweol Choi’s Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-era Korea (2020). Hu’s study highlights “Taiwan’s uniqueness as a colonial crossroads between Han Taiwanese customs and Japanese ideas and practices” (2), further influenced by ideas from the New Culture Movement in China after 1919. Convincingly demonstrating that doka was fundamentally gendered, Hu makes the broader claim that: “Although colonial officials used race and ethnicity as the main markers of political and socioeconomic hierarchy … gender remained the most powerful and persistent defining marker of sociopolitical hierarchy in Taiwan” (4). This is a provocative contention, and one wonders if a comparative approach rather than a singular focus on the Han Taiwanese population might have helped the author to more fully develop this argument. As Hu notes, primary school education in colonial Taiwan was segregated into three tiers based on ethnicity, with separate schools set up for Japanese, Han, and indigenous children. One would like to learn more about the ways in which the curriculum and vocational training for these three groups differed. Given this ethnic segregation, to what degree did the ideology of “good wife, wise mother” unite female students across ethnic as well as class divisions? A more overtly comparative framework incorporating the indigenous peoples would perhaps enable readers to gain a fuller understanding of the intersectionality of ethnicity, gender and class at play, and support the author’s aim of highlighting “Taiwan’s uniqueness as a colonial crossroads” (2).
Tracing the spread of new ideas about female education, Bond’s Dreaming the New Woman shows how Chinese reformers like Liang Qichao (1873–1929) advocated women’s education in service of national strengthening in the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Bond argues that these reformers’ new framing of female education finally enabled Christian missionary schools, which had struggled to gain a foothold in China since the 1840s, to attract pupils from elite families and begin charging tuition fees. Contributing to the literature on women’s education in modern China, Dreaming the New Woman is the first book to tell the story of missionary schools for girls in Republican China (1912–1949) from the perspective of alumnae themselves. Challenging what she calls the “threefold process of exclusion” (4) of Christian Chinese women in the historiography of modern China (due to their problematic class status as members of the elite, their “foreign” faith, and their gender), Bond aims to “re-center our focus on Chinese Christian women’s agency within the story of Chinese Christianity and the Chinese women’s movement” (10). Bond demonstrates that “the way that history has viewed these women is in marked contrast to the way these women perceived themselves” (4), and argues that Chinese missionary schoolgirls advanced a form of “gendered, Christian modernity” (4) by articulating a “vision of how highly educated Christian Chinese women, such as themselves, could transform and strengthen the nation, allowing China to stand up to and eventually overtake encroaching imperialist powers, such as Japan” (4).
The six chapters of Bond’s book cover the history of Chinese missionary schools for girls from 1844 to 1952, focusing on five Protestant missionary schools in East China (Saint Mary’s Hall and McTyeire in Shanghai; Riverside Academy in Ningbo; Hangzhou Union Girls’ School in Hangzhou; and the Laura Haygood Normal School in Suzhou). Founded between 1881 and 1923, these elite schools count some of modern China’s most famous female figures among their alumnae, including Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Eileen Chang, Rosalyn Koo, and Tu Youyou, and more generally helped produce a new cosmopolitan elite class in the Republican era. Bond shows that characterizing missionary schools as “foreign” is misleading, since after 1927 they were required to register with the KMT government, and to have a Chinese headmistress and a Chinese majority of board members. The curriculum at these schools typically included English, Chinese, mathematics, science, civics, hygiene, home economics, physical education, art, music, dance, drama, and religious education. As in colonial public schools in Taiwan, domestic education remained a central component of missionary education for girls, but the schools in Bond’s study gained renown for academic excellence (McTyeire was also famed for musical excellence), offering the best preparation for those aspiring to attend college (12). In comparison to Hu’s portrait of schoolgirls in Taiwan, where alternative models such as the “New Woman” or “black cat” (modern girl) apparently never “posed a serious threat to the official ideal” (Hu, 71), Bond’s work suggests that Chinese missionary schoolgirls had more freedom to “dream” possibilities for the “New Woman” and even to experiment with communism.
Like Hu, Bond ends her book by considering the legacy of the educational reforms she describes and examining nostalgia. Some of the most striking material in the book concerns the post-Mao efforts of alumnae to rehabilitate the reputations of their alma maters, which culminated in 1992 in a reunion of McTyeire Old Girls in Shanghai. Bond shows that as elite identities for women are being reinvented in contemporary China, the unique identities and traditions of the old missionary schools are taking on new forms and meanings. One fascinating example of this is the use of colonial nostalgia in the marketing for a redevelopment of Saint Mary’s Hall as a shopping center. Bond argues that the story of missionary schools for girls has “come full circle” (208) after their denunciation during the Maoist era, as fluency in English and foreign-style education today “once again confer social and cultural capital” (3).
Bond predicates her methodology on the notion that “the writings and memories of missionary schoolgirls provide crucial evidence of Chinese women’s agency in creating a vision of a Protestant modernity for China” (7) and, given the author’s aim to uncover women’s “agency,” this reviewer would like to see the author engage more fully with the theoretical literature on agency and the concept’s grounding in notions of the autonomous self. The question of how best to understand “agency” in the context of China’s tumultuous twentieth-century history is especially interesting and has been a subject of debate in the field.Footnote 2
Dreaming the New Woman and Good Wife, Wise Mother contribute to the literature on the complex confluence of Western missionary discourse, imperial feminism, and nationalisms in East Asia during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, as well as the “translingual practice”Footnote 3 through which Western Learning entered China via Japan. Both books are noteworthy for combining archival and oral history sources, with special emphasis on the latter. Bond interviewed seventy-five alumnae from the five Chinese missionary schools living in China or the US, conducting her interviews either in English or in Mandarin. Hu interviewed thirty-nine women and fourteen men located in Taiwan or the US, conducting her interviews in Taiwanese Hoklo with some Japanese and Mandarin, and further used published oral histories. Insisting on the primacy of the voices of the women who lived through these histories and experienced the educational experiments firsthand, Bond and Hu enable readers to see the dramatic changes that these women took part in through their own eyes, with the result that we see history not in terms of the familiar colonizer/colonized or imperialist/anti-imperialist binaries, but rather in its messiness and ambiguity. These women’s stories were told at a distance (of time, and in some cases space) and were profoundly shaped by the moment and place (and language) in which they were recalled. Both authors reflect on these issues as well as their own positionality. Whereas Bond interviewed her subjects as a “foreigner” (18) (an outsider status that conferred both privilege and drawbacks), Hu assumed a position as an insider who capitalized on her fluency in Taiwanese Hoklo to create “a sense of familiarity” (17) with her interviewees. To collect interviews on this scale is a significant achievement, and these books will be valuable resources for students and provide food for thought for those interested in oral history, with all its pitfalls and challenges. Bond’s thoughtful consideration of her personal relationships with her interviewees—some of whom became friends while others adopted a teacher–student relationship—will be especially useful to students contemplating similar oral history projects.
Read as a pair, these two recent books not only shed light on the impact of educational reform on the lived experiences of schoolgirls on both sides of the Taiwan Strait but also reveal how far their experiences (and recollections) of Japanese imperialism and the second Sino-Japanese war diverged. These works will be of interest to scholars of global women’s studies, the comparative history of education in East Asia, and colonial nostalgia.
