Abstract
In Keeping the Nation’s House, Helen Schneider analyzes the circuitous histories of “home economics” (jia zheng) and its practitioners through China’s twentieth century. In seven chronologically ordered chapters covering the period from 1915 to the post-Mao era, and especially focused on the pivotal period of the Republic, Schneider ably demonstrates how a “pervasive awareness of the intimate relationship between family life and public politics” (p. 6) inspired reformers to promote the discipline as a key for securing China’s future. As Schneider makes clear, gendered responsibilities in home economics were so institutionalized and foundational to the modern Chinese nation-state that “interpreting changes relating to domesticity is fundamental to understanding the transformations that took place in twentieth century China.” (p. 225) In the West, scholars such as Norbert Elias have argued that the treatment of “children” as children has been relatively new and transformative; similarly changing concepts of children and parenthood in China emerged hand in hand with the desire to create a “civilized,” “modern” nation. To that end, control over the “triad of domestic management (food, clothing, shelter)” (p. 15) promised to yield enormous results for personal lives and the political environments in which they were lived.
From the Qing Empire to the People’s Republic, varied regimes aimed to structure women’s education in pursuit of their own particular agendas. Late Qing officials promoted women’s education with the aim of creating household managers. A decade after the empire’s collapse, such ambitions had expanded to include not only efficient household management but also women’s engagement in broader social reform and the engineering of a new and improved China. Schneider underlines how, during the Republic, the discipline of home economics was patterned to train women in managerial, scientific, and intellectual work to infuse the social space of the home with new political and modern significances. Schneider expands upon earlier scholarship, especially that of Mark Swislocki, to demonstrate how late Qing and Republican texts designed for women signaled marked shifts from expectations of wives to prepare victuals to incorporating scientific knowledge of vitamins, minerals, and protein to create nutritional meals for their families. Through the 1920s and 1930s, idealistic, at times even utopian, understandings of sciences (including biology, chemistry, medicine, and psychology), filtered into home economics as social commentators warned that China lagged behind England and the United States and that fundamental change to education was essential. Schneider also builds upon Paul Bailey’s earlier work to show how education was a form of “modernizing conservatism” that aimed for women to be more effective mothers and domestic managers. Contemporary women’s journals make clear that women were still seen to be chiefly responsible for child rearing, from prenatal stages through school age and beyond.
By the late 1930s, the Republican regime was able to establish considerable control over a portion of China’s educational system, prioritizing practical skills as a central plank in wartime education. The strategic importance of domestic skills and moral cultivation, including knowledge, frugality, industry, tidiness, and cleanliness, reflected home economics’ emerging status as “a discipline important to the moral development of Chinese society” (p. 103). Improving home economics was directly tied to the nation’s fate, to wit the aims of the New Life Movement, which was launched by Chiang Kaishek and Song Meiling in 1934, emerges as more than the superficial effort it has long been derided as. Schneider underlines how the aim of creating well-ordered families was envisioned to strengthen the nation and foster a national morality powerful enough to counter the forces of seemingly unquenchable Japanese imperialist aggression. Home economics supporters believed that instilling a sense of order and rationality through careful cleaning, new leisure activities, and management of the home would reinvigorate the Chinese population. In the 1940s, the Nationalist Ministry of Education even created social education experimental zones, to provide hands-on training—roughly at the same time such initiatives were being launched in the United States. In Jiangsu Provincial Number One, for example, students lived on-site for three months, sharpening their skills in accounting, nutrition, and hygiene. Student graduates subsequently employed their skills within their homes, anticipating society-wide benefits. Such work was seen as essential to the nation’s survival and development. Yet, despite its significance and its establishment in institutions of higher learning, home economics remained women-centered, with grave consequences for how the Communist Party viewed the field and its proponents.
As home economics became increasingly institutionalized, the question of how “Chinese” and how “Western” it should be was a growing preoccupation as the scientific rationalization of domestic spaces was trumpeted. The United States played a leading role in providing examples and educating professionals. From 1924 to 1949, approximately 120 Chinese women studied home economics in the United States, making them the largest group of foreign students to study home economics there during the time. When Yenching University began offering courses in home economics in the fall of 1923, they were planned by Americans Ava B. Milam and Camilla Mills (p. 124). Schneider makes a strong case that Americans, American-trained women, and American institutional models played enormous roles in the discipline in China. One area for future analysis will surely be similar roles played by their Japan counterparts. As noted by Schneider, Chinese recognized that Japanese women’s education (through courses instilling desire for self-improvement, patriotism, and volunteer spirit) created a whole class of professional, dedicated women whose work ordering domestic spheres contributed to the creation of a strong, albeit imperialist, country. Hopefully, the portion of this book that is devoted to Japanese influences will inspire others to analyze in even greater depth inter-Asian flows of home economics ideas and people.
Schneider makes it poignantly clear that most home economists did not anticipate that their field would be torn asunder following the victory of the Communist Party; they believed that their efforts had saved China from disintegration and foreign occupation. They, too, envisioned a radically altered, strong China in which they would make valuable contributions. During the Republic, the discipline was women-centered—women took the classes, which were proposed, taught, and largely under the control of women. In Chapter 6, Schneider shows how Maoists denigrated the field by associating it with the “bourgeois woman,” the so-called tai-tai, who was caricaturized as a solely “unproductive parasitic type of person” (p. 217). The dismantling of the discipline in the name of socialist revolution had widespread ramifications and Schneider’s work underlines the injudicious nature of how the women and their work were treated, suggesting deep connections between the disparaging of home economics and the ravages of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. However, with the passing of the Maoist era, discrepancies between how home economics was practiced and understood have begun to be redressed. From the 1990s, increasing recognition has been extended to the considerable successes of Republican home economics as reformers seek ways by which China can be made stronger, once again, through scientific family management. Schneider concludes her study by drawing parallels between the Republican period and the post-Mao reform era, as contributors to women’s magazines in the latter period have emphasized happy families as the cornerstone of a stronger nation and encouraged women to fulfill domestic and social responsibilities.
Keeping the Nation’s House is a great contribution to the study of Republican China. It is emblematic of renewed scholarly focus on the period that challenges long-held views that the Republic (and the New Life Movement in particular) was a singular failure. In terms of the New Life Movement, Schneider compels readers to reconsider the ideas and aims that drove it—the Republican regime implemented effective programs and policies directed at empowering women and including them in the important job of nation-building. For the Republic more generally, this volume adds considerable depth to contemporary women’s history and the significances that were attributed to women and the domestic sphere as the state sought to recover from decades of strife. Helen Schneider makes a powerful case that home economics and women performed vital roles in a Republic worthy of reenvisioning.