День: 05.10.2015

Debt and redemption

As suggested above, debt and debt management were crucial practical elements in the lives of these recently ‘married’ couples. Also, debt can shape future practices and has the power to distort aspects of relation­ships. Debt, of course, has strong moral connotations in cultures that are still influenced by a Protestant ethic and distaste for all […]

SEX AND WORK

A more enduring argument was that charity was the best way of turning orphan girls and prostitutes into economically productive members of society. This consideration, too, had long antecedents. Forced labour in houses of correction had been introduced in Tudor times as a means of accustoming the idle and the dissolute to eco­nomic as well […]

‘Unharnessed fillies’

The modernizing conservative agenda on women’s education in the early Republic In January 1915, on the eve of the New Culture Movement that was to launch an ‘iconoclastic’ assault on the Confucian tradition, a Shanghai teacher, Yu Tiansui, wrote an article on women’s education for the first issue of Funu zazhi (The Ladies Journal).1 Echoing […]

PENITENCE AND RESURRECTION

Philanthropy promised to deliver three kinds of benefit: spiritual, demographic, and economic. Its methods were evidently novel. But the arguments for it were strikingly similar to those that had tradi­tionally underpinned punishment. The most fundamental motive of both, for example, was to rescue sinners from damnation. Unlike other hospitals, boasted the support­ers of the Magdalen, […]