ABSTRACT
The sense of alarm and dissatisfaction revealed in these articles pertaining to the direction of women’s education and the behaviour of female students had already begun to be expressed during the last years of the Qing dynasty (see Chapter 2), but it was to be during the early years of the Republic that such concerns attained fever pitch in the periodical and women’s press. As discussed in Chapter 3 this was a time of growing public visibility of women, and the figure of the female student became a particular object of discussion. In effect, female students represented an entirely unprecedented phenomenon – to the extent that
they constituted a new ‘social category’. Although a recent study has applied this label to the ‘career woman’ who began to emerge during the May Fourth period,4
it is perhaps more apposite in the case of the female student. This is because there were more female students than professional women at this time, their appearance predated the May Fourth period and they were the object of a far more prevalent discourse. Quite out of proportion to their actual numbers, female students became the obsessive concern of male and female commentators and educators alike, and, as this chapter will show, their ‘disorderly’ behaviour became a touchstone for broader anxieties concerning the implications and consequences of social and cultural change during this period. Furthermore, the ‘modernizing conservative’ agenda on women’s education promoted by government officials, educators and male intellectuals in general can be seen as an attempt to regain control of the discourse and practice of the project that bureaucratic and intellectual elites feared had been slipping away from them during the last years of the Qing. It was also a key element in the larger process of ‘behavioural modernization’ begun during the last years of the monarchy and which was to result in more ambitious efforts by these elites during the early Republic to control popular culture.
