PAUL J. BAILEY. Gender and Education in China: Gender Discourses and Women-s Schooling in the Early Twentieth Century. (Routledge Contemporary China Series.) New York: Routledge. 2007. Pp. ix, 246. $120.00

Abstract

Paul J. Bailey uses the term “modernizing conservatism” as a key concept in this book to describe and analyze the debate on women's education in early twentieth-century China. The term refers to a particular strand of thought concerned with the possible unwelcome consequences resulting from the implementation of a modern education system, while endorsing modernizing changes. The “modernizing conservative” dialogue, which permeated the newspaper and periodical press during the period from the 1890s to the May Fourth Movement in the late 1910s, both reflected and influenced this initial period of women's public education. Five chapters are well constructed around this theme. The introduction offers a historical background against which the study investigates the initial move for women's education. Chapter one reveals that the campaign for girls' education in the late Qing was organized by government officials, reformers, and male intellectuals who were exposed to Japanese influence. The key issue at the time was not whether women should be educated but rather the content and purpose of female education. As part of the process of adopting Japan's path to modernization, the notion of “worthy mothers and virtuous wives” (liangmu xianqi) dominated the curriculum for girls' schooling and was believed to be linked to China's survival. In 1907, the Qing government formally sanctioned education for women, and the growing numbers of girls' schools from 1902 to 1911 signaled one of the most dramatic social and cultural changes of the time. In chapter two statistical data, media reports, and textbooks and songs used in girls' schools provide detailed information about women's education in practice. According to Bailey, the discourse of women's public education in this period represented both the endorsement of modern education and an “ambivalence about its possible consequence” (p. 45).