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Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls Under Japanese Rule Paperback – 24 September 2024
by Assistant Professor Fang Yu Hu (Author), & 3 more
Traces Japan's efforts to modernize Taiwan through gendered educational practices
In Good Wife, Wise Mother, female education and citizenship serve as a lens through which to examine Taiwan's uniqueness as a colonial crossroads between Chinese and Japanese ideas and practices. A latecomer to the age of imperialism, Japan used modernization efforts in Taiwan to cast itself as a benevolent force among its colonial subjects and imperial competitors. In contrast to most European colonies, where only elites received an education, in Taiwan Japan built elementary schools intended for the entire population, including girls. In 1897 it developed a program known as "Good Wife, Wise Mother" that sought to transform Han Taiwanese girls into modern Japanese female citizens. Drawing on Japanese and Chinese newspapers, textbooks, oral interviews, and fiction, Fang Yu Hu illustrates how this seemingly progressive project advanced a particular Japanese vision of modernity, womanhood, and citizenship, to which the colonized Han Taiwanese people responded with varying degrees of collaboration, resistance, adaptation, and adoption. Hu also assesses the program's impact on Taiwan's class structure, male-female interactions, and political identity both during and after the end of Japanese occupation in 1945. Good Wife, Wise Mother expands the study of Taiwanese history by contributing important gendered and nonelite perspectives. It will be of interest to any historian concerned with questions of modernity, hybridity, and colonial nostalgia.
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304 pages
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English
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Book Description
Traces Japan's efforts to modernize Taiwan through gendered educational practices
About the Author
Fang Yu Hu is assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She received her PhD in history from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2015. This is her first book.
James Lin is assistant professor of history at the University of Washington.
William Lavely is professor of sociology at the University of Washington. He is a coeditor of Rural China on the Eve of Revolution: Sichuan Fieldnotes, 1949-1950 by G. William Skinner (University of Washington Press, 2016) andthe author of many articles on demography and the family in contemporary China.
Madeleine Yue Dong is professor of history and chair of China Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (University of California Press, 2004); editor of Everyday Modernity in China (University of Washington Press, 2006); and coeditor of The Modern Girl Around the World (Duke University Press, 2008).
Product details
Publisher : University of Washington Press (24 September 2024)
Language : English
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2023CSAA 18th Biennial ConferenceChinese Studies in AustraliaLinks
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“Good Wife, Wise Mother”: Assimilating Han Taiwanese Under Japanese Rule
Date: Friday, October 25, 2024
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM AEDT
Location: Online
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Talks in Chinese Humanities
In 1897, two years after Japan began its half-century rise as an imperial power, it inaugurated an ambitious experiment to make modern Japanese citizens out of Han Taiwanese schoolgirls in its first overseas colony, Taiwan. The goal of the segregated education was to train Taiwanese boys and men to become government clerks and teachers, and girls and women to become “good wives, wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo). This gendered education was part of dōka, the Japanese assimilation program, as it sought to make everyone in the empire “Japanese” as equals by teaching the Japanese language and imperial ethics with gendered roles. Constructed by engaging with the cult of domesticity in the West that envisioned the home as a private space for women and the workplace as a public space for men to build strong nation-states, “good wife, wise mother” emerged in Japan in the 1890s and was introduced to Taiwan in the same decade.
Using periodicals and Japanese language textbooks, I examine the discourse and implementation of this ideal womanhood in Taiwan. This ideal of womanhood was crucial to the civilizing mission of the colonizers. Japanese colonial authority used gender to increase the supposed distance of civilizational levels between the colonizer and the colonized. By introducing gender into the discussion on dōka in Taiwan, I show that the promise of equality and inclusion from dōka became even less attainable and thus slowed assimilation to the supposedly superior Japanese civilization when colonial officials and educators characterized the colonized as feminine and depicted colonized women as the symbol of Taiwan’s “backwardness.”
Gendered assimilation became almost attainable for the Taiwanese toward the end of World War II compared to the pre-war dōka efforts. Ethnic and class divisions were blurred during wartime mobilization as the colonial government expanded the responsibilities of schoolgirls and women, thus blurring the distinction between Taiwanese and Japanese. Wartime mobilization redefined gendered assimilation in colonial Taiwan, as it shifted the training and focus of “good wives, wise mothers”, from the individual households only, to the entire empire, which meant that schoolgirls were trained to become “good wives, wise mothers” of the empire.
About the speaker
Fang Yu Hu is Assistant Professor of History at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona where she teaches Chinese, Japanese, and world history classes. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2015. Professor Hu has published articles in the journals ERAS of Monash University and Twentieth-Century China. Her podcast interview on the popular Taiwanese film, Cape No. 7, was published in 2021. She recently published her book, Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls Under Japanese Rule, with the University of Washington Press in September 2024. Her current research focuses on overseas Taiwanese in mainland China and Southeast Asia in the first half of the twentieth century.
“Talks in Chinese Humanities” is co-presented by the China Studies Centre, the Discipline of Chinese Studies and the Australian Society for Asian Humanities at the University of Sydney and the UNSW Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture’s Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art.
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