With the admission of young women to Beijing University in 1919 and the creation of the Beijing Women’s Higher Normal School in the same year — thus sanctioning the principle of higher education for women — the initial period of women’s public education in China that began with the opening of the Chinese Girls’ School […]

While condemnation of the ‘undisciplined’ and ‘arrogant’ behaviour of female students had been a constant feature of discourse in the newspaper and periodical press in the early years of the Republic, demonstrating an unease with the way women’s education was developing, so newspaper stories about female students during the May Fourth period (late 1910s and […]

Throughout the May Fourth period, from the late 1910s to early 1920s, educators, reformers and general commentators emphasized the importance of domestic sci­ence for women’s education, indicating a continuing and nagging fear that had taken root almost from the very beginning of public education for girls. Such a fear centred on the perceived tendency for […]

Although the practice of co-education at primary level had been sanctioned by the new Republican education system of 1912, most schools during the early years of the Republic continued to be segregated according to gender (school statistics that were reported to Beijing from the provinces consistently differentiate boys’ and girls’ schools).8 Moreover, as noted in […]

In September 1919, at the height of intellectual debate and student protest that has come to be known as the May Fourth Movement (or in its wider cultural ramifi­cations, the New Culture Movement), a female student by the name of Xie Wanying contributed an article to the Beijing newspaper, Chenbao (Morning Post), that provided a […]

The prescriptions of officials, educators and commentators notwithstanding, it is clear that anxiety continued to prevail over the prospect that girls and young women would ‘misunderstand’ the rationale and purposes of women’s schooling so carefully delineated by the former. The increasingly acerbic critical discourse on female students’ dress, behaviour and attitudes after 1912 in the […]

The response of officials, educators and newspaper/periodical commentators to this growing public presence of women and, in particular, female students has to be placed in the larger context of ‘behavioural modernization’ that had become a concern of reformers in the post-Boxer Uprising period (see Chapter 2), and which continued to occupy the minds of Republican […]

Given the political instability of the period and frequent bouts of domestic armed conflicts, especially after 1916 when central power from Beijing following the death of President Yuan Shikai began to ebb in favour of provincial and local mil­itarists, the growth of women’s education was remarkably steady. However, in terms of numbers of schools and […]

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 […]

It was against such a background that the dress and behaviour of adolescent girls in the wake of the Revolution became a particular source of concern (contempo­rary Western observers such as the French consular official, Jean Rodes, referred to a general outbreak of ‘hysteria’ amongst young people, women, students and theatrical performers).100 Even Tan Sheying, […]