| Abstract The modernizing conservative discourse on women’s education during the last years of the Qing and early years of the Republic represented a pervasive subterranean current in the tide of social and cultural change at this time, revealing a lack of consensus over its rational and aims. Such a lack of consensus symbolized a larger fragmentation in the public discourse on women, as officials, educators, reformers and revolutionaries each asserted the right to define and formulate women’s image and role in the quest to equip China to meet the challenges of modern world.
However, the constant, almost obsessive, insistence by modernizing conservatives on the need for women’s education to rejuvenate supposedly innate virtues and train skillful household managers, and their ever more alarmist tone after 1912 indicated that the control and guidance of women’s education were slipping away from them. After all, the speed with which public education for women was formally sanctioned and implemented in early twentieth century China is sometimes overlooked. Thus several years after the first privately-run Chinese schools for girls were formally sanctioned��in 1907��; by 1912 the new Republic allowed the establishment of secondary education for girls, and in 1919 higher-level education for women was officially sanctioned when Beijing Women’s Higher Normal School was opened and women were allowed to enroll at Beijing University. Evidently, the clearly prescribed curricula and rules of behaviour were not universally implemented or adhered to.
The ways female students themselves responded to new educational opportunities were varied and multiple. Reading between the lines of this discourse, it seems that young women became more assertive and expressed their individually in a bewildering arrays of dress and hair styles. Their motions of what education could offer them were directly opposed to the assumptions of those who demanded that education should instill virtues of deference , compliance and modesty while also providing the knowledge and skills necessary for women to fulfil their indispensable role as managers of household. Their involvement in school protests and strikes, as well as their participation in public exhibition, displays and national relief campaigns clearly demonstrated their contestation of this conservative discourse. Such a variety of response amongst young women to educational opportunities in the early twentieth century needs to be highlighted and further explored since it has hitherto been overlooked by, or submerged within, a more dominant narrative of women’s politicization during the May Fourth movement and the beginnings of an organized women’s movement under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party. |
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