WOMEN AND FAMILY EDUCATION REFORM IN WARTIME CHINA, 1937–45

Abstract

During China’s war with Japan, the Chinese state and its affiliates turned their attention to a dual project of resistance and national construction. Social reformers and institutions believed that strengthening the minds and bodies of the population should begin with improving families, and that this in turn necessitated educating women to become better family managers and mothers. This essay provides an overview of two projects of wartime family reform, the work of the New Life Movement Women’s Advisory Council and the development of family education experimental areas, in order to show the ways that educated women and the Guomindang state attempted to transform the families of China. By changing specific domestic practices, such as in the realms of hygiene and childrearing, these reformers aimed to create a more modern and efficient female citizenry primed for the ongoing fight against Japan.

Keywords:

• domestic management
• family education
• New Life Movement
• War of Resistance
• family values
• WWII

Notes

1 Zhou Zhilian, “Nüzi jiaoyu wenti 女子教育問題,” Letter to Ministry of Education, (1942), Second Historical Archives of China, Nanjing (hereafter SHAC) RG 5/12239. Zhou Zhilian was a graduate of Hebei Provincial Women’s Normal College and during the war she was the head of a nursery school in Beibei, which is now part of Chongqing municipality,

2 The development and institutionalization of the ideas that women should be trained in domestic management in order to help create a stronger nation over the course of the Republican period is described in Helen M. Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011).

3 Recent English-language examples include: Diana Lary, Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Rana Mitter and Aaron Moore, editors, and contributors to the special issue of Modern Asian Studies, “China in World War II, 1937–1945: Experience, Memory, and Legacy,” vol. 45, no. 2 (March 2011): 243–75; Stephen MacKinnon, Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

4 Rana Mitter, “Classifying Citizens in Nationalist China during World War II,” 243–75.

5 Clare A. Dale, “The Military and the Family: An Introduction,” Journal of Family History, vol. 27, no. 4 (October 2002): 347–51.

6 Robert Culp, “Rethinking Governmentality: Training, Cultivation, and Cultural Citizenship in Nationalist China,” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 65, no. 3 (August 2006): 529–54.

7 Patricia Thornton, Disciplining the State: Virtue, Violence and State-Making in Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

8 Terry Bodenhorn, “Chen Lifu’s Vitalism: A Guomindang Vision of Modernity in China,” in Defining Modernity: Guomindang Rhetorics of a New China, 1920-1970, edited by Terry Bodenhorn (Ann Arbor: Michigan monographs in Chinese Studies, 2002), 91–121, 99.

9 M. Colette Plum, “Orphans in the Family: Family Reform and Children’s Citizenship during the Anti-Japanese War, 1937–1945,” in Beyond Suffering; Recounting War in Modern China, edited by James Flath and Norman Smith (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 186–206, 199.

10 Christina Gilmartin and Isobel Crook, “Marriage Reform, Rural Women and the Chinese State during World War II,” in Women in China: The Republican Period in Historical Perspective, edited by Mechthild Leutner and Nicola Spakowski (Munster: Lit Verlag, 2005), 422–49.

11 William T. Rowe, Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001), 407.

12 John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 10–12, 103–07.

13 Susan Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915–1953 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 17.

14 Margaret Tillman, “The Authority of Age: Institutions for Childhood Development in China, 1895–1910,” Frontiers of History in China, vol. 17, no. 1 (March 2012): 32–60.

15 On this issue of women as markers of particular aspects of Chinese backwardness, see Louise Edwards, “Policing the Modern Woman in Republican China,” Modern China, vol. 26, no. 2 (April 2000): 115–47; on nuxing 女性 as trope in the late Qing and early twentieth century, see Tani Barlow, “Theorizing Woman: Funü, Guojia, Jiating (Chinese woman, Chinese State, Chinese Family),” in Angela Zito and Barlow, eds., Body, Subject, and Power in China (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994), 253–89. John Fitzgerald also discusses Chinese leaders’ sense of Chinese backwardness, see especially his point about Sun Yatsen’s emphasis on “governing the self and governing the state,” in his Awakening China, 11.

16 Paul Bailey, Gender and Education in China: Gender Discourses and Women’s Schooling in the Early Twentieth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); Joan Judge, The Precious Raft of History: The Past, The West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

17 See, for example, Patricia Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Women in the Song Period (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993): 128; 1997, 343–51; William T. Rowe, “Women and the Family in Mid-Qing Social Thought: The Case of Chen Hongmou,” Late Imperial China, vol. 13, no. 2 (1992); Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), esp. 199.

18 Ebrey, Inner Quarters, 183–87.

19 Dorothy Ko, “Pursuing Talent and Virtue: Education and Women’s Culture in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century China,” Late Imperial China, vol. 13, no. 1 (December 1992): 9–39; Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Susan Mann, “Grooming a Daughter for Marriage: Brides and Wives in the Mid-Qing Period,” Susan Brownell and Jeffery Wasserstrom, eds., Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 93–119.

20 For a detailed discussion on these debates, see Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House, 57–80. On women’s training in teachers’ school, see Xiaoping Cong, Teacher’s Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State, 1897–1937 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), esp. 33–37.

21 Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House, esp. chapters 2 and 3.

22 Federica Ferlanti, “The New Life Movement in Jiangxi Province, 1934–1938,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 44, no. 5 (2010): 961–1000.

23 James Thomson, While China Faced West: American Reformers in Nationalist China, 1928–1937 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 156–57; Frederic Wakeman, “A Revisionist View of the Nanjing Decade: Confucian Fascism,” The China Quarterly, 150 (June 1997): 395–432.

24 Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley and Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2007), 15–16.

25 Arif Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution,” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 34, no. 6 (August 1975): 945–80, esp. 947, 965.

26 May-ling Soong Chiang, War Messages and Other Selections by May-ling Soong Chiang (Hankou: China Information Committee, 1938), “New Life Movement in China” (article written in 1936), 319.

27 Xia Rong, Funü zhidao weiyuanhui yu kangri zhanzheng (Women’s Advisory Council and the War of Resistance against Japan) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2010).

28 Xia Rong, Funü zhidao weiyuanhui, 24, 41–42.

29 Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House, 38–42. Song Meiling spoke at length about frugality and hairstyles, for example. See Xia Rong, Funü zhidao weiyuanhui, 81.

30 Li Danke, Echoes of Chongqing: Women in Wartime China (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 21. Li’s translations of these organizations are somewhat different. My organizational titles are from an English-language pamphlet: Women’s Advisory Council, Glimpses of Chinese Women’s War-time Work (Chungking: 1945), found in SHAC RG 11/6733. According to He and Yu, on July 1, 1938, the New Life organization became “Xinshenghuo yundong cujin zonghui funü zhidao weiyuan hui 新生活運動促進總會婦女指導委員會” (New Life movement promotional overall committee, women’s advisory council). He Husheng, Yu Zejun, eds., Song Meiling Dazhuan, vol. 1 (Beijing: Huawen chubanshe, 2001). In archival documents it is often fuzhihui 婦指會, and I refer to it as the Women’s Advisory Council, or the New Life Movement Women’s Advisory Council, throughout.

31 He and Yu, Song Meiling dazhuan (vol. 1), 288. Another version of her 1938 speech is found in Chiang, War Messages and Other Selections by May-ling Soong Chiang, “Appeal to Women of China” (August, 1937), 1.

32 Danke Li, Echoes of Chongqing, 20–21; Xiaoping Sun, “New Life: State Mobilization and Women’s Place in Nationalist China, 1934–1949” (PhD dissertation, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2008).

33 China Information Committee, China after Four Years of War (Chongqing: China Publishing Company, 1941).

34 Xinyun funü zhidao weiyuanhui (New Life Movement Women’s Advisory Council), Gongzuo banian (Eight years of work) (Nanjing: 1946), 282. For more on the rural service work, see Helen M. Schneider, “Mobilising Women: The Women’s Advisory Council, Resistance and Reconstruction during China’s War with Japan,” European Journal of East Asian Studies, vol. 11, no. 2 (December 2012): 213–36.

35 Gu Xiaoshui, “Kangzhan shiqi de guomin jingshen zongdongyuan yundong” (Citizens’ spirituality mobilization campaigns in the War of Resistance) Kang Ri zhanzheng yanjiu, no. 1 (2004): 45–60.

36 Robert Culp, “Setting the Sheet of Loose Sand: Conceptions of Society and Citizenship in the Nanjing Decade Party Doctrine and Civics Textbooks,” in Defining Modernity: Guomingdang Rhetorics of a New China, 1920–1970, edited by Terry Bodenhorn (Ann Arbor: Michigan monographs in Chinese Studies, 2002), 45–90.

37 “Xinyun funü ganbu xunlian ban biye minglu” (List of the New Life Movements’ female cadre training classes graduates), Funü Xinyun, vol. 2, nos. 6-7 (June 1940): 84–88; Xu Youchun, Minguo renwu dacidian: Zengding ben (Biographical dictionary of the Republican Period, revised edition) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei Renmin chubanshe, 2007): 1594.

38 Chongqing Municipal Archives: 0016-1-0057. Huang appears on these payroll charts in this position from 1941 to 1943.

39 Huang Peilan, “Zhanshi de funü shenghuo zhidao” (Women’s life guidance in wartime) Funü Xinyun, vol. 2, nos. 9–10 (1941): 4–6.

40 Ibid., 4–6.

41 Ibid., 5–6.

42 “Shenghuo zhidao zu yiyue zhi sanyue gongzuo baogao” (The life improvement team’s work report from January to March) Funü Xin yun, vol. 3, no.1 (March 1941): 45–47.

43 Poster from report: “Diwu zhanqu Anhui sheng dongyuan weiyuanhui funü gongzuo weiyuanhui: yinian lai gongzuo gaikuang 第五戰區安徽省動員委員會婦女工作委員會: 一年來工作高況” (Fifth war area, Anhui province workers committee, women’s work committee: situation after the first year of work) (February 1940) SHAC RG 11/834.

44 Ibid.

45 For an extended discussion of the ideas of family education, see Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House, especially chapter 5.

46 Zhou Fohai, “Jiating jiaoyu ying yi xuexiao wei zhongxin” (Schools should be the center of household education) Kuaile Jiating 1, no.5 (January 1937): 4–5.

47 Chen Lifu, The Storm Clouds Clear Over China: The Memoir of Ch’en Li-fu, 1900-1993. Sydney H. Chang and Ramon H. Meyers, eds. (Palo Alto: Hoover Institution Press, 1993), 149. See also, Zhang Shanzhen, “Chen Lifu yu kangzhan shiqi de Zhongguo jiaoyu” (Chen Lifu and Chinese education during the War of Resistance) in Kang-Ri zhanzheng yanjiu no. 3 (2006): 90–110.

48 Chen, Storm Clouds, 157.

49 Ministry of Education, “Zhanshi geji jiaoyu shishi fang’an gangyao 戰時各級教育實施方案綱要” (Implementing plans at each educational level) (1938) as found printed in booklet of regulations (SHAC RG668/14).

50 Chen, Storm Clouds, 150.

51 Chen Lifu, Zhanshi jiaoyu fangzhen (Direction of wartime education) (Zhengzhong shuju, 1939) (1–4, 1–105) (Reprint, Taibei, Taiwan: Guomindang zhongyang weiyuanhui dangshi weiyuanhui, 1985: 175–287), 25.

52 Zhang, “Chen Lifu yu kangzhan shiqi de Zhongguo jiaoyu”, 108.

53 Ministry of Education, “Zhanshi geji jiaoyu shishi fang’an gangyao,” 11.

54 Ministry of Education, “Zhanshi geji jiaoyu shishi fang’an gangyao,” 12.

55 National Chongqing Normal College, Report on first year activities. “Guoli Chongqing Shifan xuexiao zhuban jiaoyubu di er jiating jiaoyu shiyan qu, di yi nian shishi gongzuo baogao 國立重慶師範學校主辦教育部第二家庭教育實驗區, 第一年事实报告” (National Chongqing Normal College and Ministry of Education’s Number Two Family Education Experimental Area: First Year Report) SHAC RG 5/9347.

56 Jiang Xuezhu (1901–?) graduated from National Beijing Women’s Higher Normal School in 1924, and went on to serve as head of many different middle schools including Chongqing Girls’ Normal School. See: Xu Youchun, Minguo renwu da cidian (Biographical Dictionary of the Republican Period) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1991), 229–30.

57 Jiang Xuezhu, “Woguo nüzi jiaoyu muqian ying qu zhi tujing” (The road that Chinese women’s education must take), Jiangsu Jiaoyu, vol. 3, no. 4 (April 1934): 27–31.

58 Jiang Xuezhu, letter to Ministry of Education (1942), SHAC RG 5/12239.

59 Ministry of Education, Social education division, “Jiating jiaoyu zhongyao faling 家庭教育重要法令” (Important regulations on family education), (November 1941), 1. SHAC RG 5/12232.

60 “Jiating jiaoyu zhongyao faling,” 4–5

61 “Jiating jiaoyu de biaozhun 家庭教育的標準 (Standards for Family Education),” (c. 1941) SHAC, RG 5/9347.

62 Ibid.

63 Inspector’s Report to the Ministry of Education, “Guoli Chongqing shifan xuexiao zhuban jiaoyubu dier jiating jiaoyu shiyan qu: shicha baogao 國立重慶師範學校主辦教育部第二家庭教育實驗區: 視察報告” (National Chongqing Normal College and Ministry of Education’s Family Education Experimental Area: Investigator’s Report) (January 1943), SHAC RG 5/12232.

64 Memo from Jiang Xuezhu, “Guoli Nüzi shifan xuexiao xuesheng shehui fuwu nian shishi jihua 國立女子師範學校學生社會服務年實施計劃” (National Women’s Normal College: Students’ social service year plan) (November 11, 1942), SHAC RG 5/11523.

65 National Chongqing Normal College, Report on first year activities, SHAC RG 5/9347.

66 Inspector’s Report to the Ministry of Education (January, 1943), SHAC RG 5/12232.

67 Poster “營養豐富的食品 Yingyang fengfu de shipin” (Nutritionally rich foods), SHAC RG 5/12232.

68 For examples of these posters, see Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House, 159–60.

69 For more on milk consumption, see Susan Glosser, “The Business of Family: You Huaigao and the Commercialization of a May Fourth Ideal,” Modern China, vol. 20, no. 2 (April 1995): 80–116.

70 For more on wartime nutritional efforts, especially expanding the consumption of tofu, see Jia Chen Fu, “Scientising Relief: Nutritional Activism from Shanghai to the Southwest, 1937–1945,” European Journal of East Asian Studies, vol. 11, no. 2 (December 2012): 259–82.

71 Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty Port China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 16, 49–50.

72 “Guoli Nüzi shifan xuexiao sanshisan xueniandu juban shehui jiaoyu gongzuo shishi baogao 國立女子師範學校三十三學年度举办社會教育工作實施報告” (National Women’s Normal College, Report on the social education work activities of the 1944 academic year), SHAC RG 5/11523.

73 There is overlap here between the memorializing of virtuous behavior in imperial times, prior to these Nationalist attempts to mark doorways, as well as with the subsequent Communist marking of meritorious households. For the latter case see, Ann Anagnost, National Past-times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), esp. chapter 4.

74 National Chongqing Normal College, First year report, SHAC RG 5/9347.

75 Ibid.

76 National Women’s Normal College, Report on the social education work activities of the 1944 academic year, SHAC RG 5/11523.

77 “Guoli Nüzi shifan xuexiao sanshisi niandu juban shehui jiaoyu gongzuo jihua 國立女子師範學校三十四學年度举办社會教育工作實施報告” (National Women’s Normal College, report on the social education work of the 1945 academic year), SHAC RG 5/11523.

78 “National Women’s Normal College, Report on the social education work activities of the 1944 academic year,” SHAC RG 5/11523.

79 Ibid.

80 Wang Minghan et al., Xibei shifan daxue xiaoshi (1939–1989) (The History of Northwest Normal University) (Xining: Qinghai renmen chubanshi: 1989), 8. See also, “Guoli Xibei Shifan xuexiao sanshier nianfen juban shehui jiaoyu jihua 國立西北師範學校三十二年份举办社會教育計劃” (National Northwest Normal College, social education plan for 1943), SHAC RG 5/11523.

81 “Guoli xibei shifan xueyuan Lanzhou shi shi zhengfu heban guomin jiaoyu shiyanqu sanshisan niandu gongzuo baogaoshu 國立西北師範學院蘭州市市政府合辦國民教育實驗區三十三年度工作報告” (Report of the 1944 activities of the Lanzhou city government and National Northwest Normal College jointly sponsored citizens’ education experimental area) (cover page dated May 4, 1945), SHAC RG 5/10986.

82 Ibid.

83 Inspectors’ Report to The Ministry of Education on Chongqing Normal’s family education area (January 1943), SHAC RG 5/12232.

84 Chen Li-fu, The Storm Clouds, 157.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Helen M Schneider

Helen M. Schneider is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Virginia Tech. She has recently held a position as a researcher with the China's War with Japan Program, a Leverhulme-funded research collaboration based at the University of Oxford.

Correspondence to: Helen M. Schneider, Department of History, Virginia Tech, 431 Major Williams Hall, Blacksburg VA 24061-0117, USA. Email: [email protected]