During this transition period women — and female students in particular — were becoming increasingly publicly visible.32 Significantly, this growing public visibil­ity was symbolized by the use of the term nujie (women’s circles), first used during the anti-American boycott in 190533 and in 1907 during the campaign to redeem the Jiangsu-Zhejiang railway from foreign interests.34 […]

During these years radical new images and representations of women were promoted in the newspaper and periodical press as a response to the potential opportunities that apparently lay before them to enlarge their social roles. An article in the first issue of Funu shibao (The Ladies Times)16 in 1911, for example, admiringly pointed to the […]

The modernizing reforms implemented by the Qing dynasty after 1901 ultimately failed to guarantee its survival. Abroad, the court faced increasing anti-Qing rhetoric amongst radical Chinese students in Japan who blamed the ‘barbarian’ Manchu rulers for China’s plight and condemned them as a hindrance to the coun­try’s progress and unity, while Republican revolutionaries in exile […]

School readers for girls, which began to appear several years before the Qing government’s formal sanction of public education for women in 1907, reinforced the idea that girls were the future ‘mothers of the nation’ (guomin zhi mu) responsi­ble for the cultivation of patriotic sons.172 Furthermore, as a reader published in 1905 insisted, women’s principal […]

It was during the last decade of the Qing dynasty that a strand of thinking on women’s education emerged that may best be described as ‘modernizing conservatism’, and which was to permeate early Republican discourse after 1912 (see Chapter 4). It represented both an endorsement of modernizing change as an effective means to strengthen the […]

During the last years of the dynasty girls’ schools were located in a variety of improvised places, including private homes, rented buildings, former Confucian academies and appropriated Buddhist temples. Thus the Girls’ School of Pleasant Instruction (yujiao ntixuetang), founded in 1905 by a merchant, Shen Shouqing, in Beijing was originally housed in Shen’s own residence […]

Expectations and misgivings The appearance of public schools for girls during the last decade of the Qing dynasty represents one of the most dramatic social and cultural changes of the period. Such a phenomenon not only contributed to the growing public visibility of adolescent girls and women in general,1 but also set in motion wider […]

Between 1902 and 1907, when the Qing government finally sanctioned public education for girls (primary and teacher training schools), male and female activists continued to open schools for girls. In the same year that the Wuben Girls’ School was opened, for example, the Chinese Educational Association — founded in the spring of 1902 to promote […]

On the eve of the 1898 reform period, a number of male reformers and their wives met to discuss the establishment of a girls’ school in Shanghai. These included Zheng Guanying, Kang Guangren (the brother of Kang Youwei), Liang Qichao and his wife Li Huixian (1868-1925),41 Jing Yuanshan (1841-1903), the head of the Shanghai Telegraph […]

In 1892 the comprador reformer Zheng Guanying (1842-1923) advocated women’s education for the specific purpose of cultivating ‘virtuous women, virtuous wives, and virtuous mothers’ (xian ’nu, xianqi, xianmu).26 An unsuccessful candidate in the lower-level degree examinations, Zheng in 1860 had entered the commercial pro­fession in Shanghai, where he worked in the offices of the British […]