In March 1928, in connection with the Medical Association, the Hong Kong Young Women’s and the Young Men’s Christian Association (HKYWCA and HKYMCA respectively) organized a one-week health campaign where lectures on ‘personal and home hygiene and public health’ and free vaccinations were delivered. During the campaign, female physicians were in charge of the physical examination for women, while examinations for men were conducted by members of the Medical Association.Footnote 1 Over the span of the health week, over 300 people were examined by physicians and over 600 attended meetings.Footnote 2 These health campaigns organized by the HKYWCA – in liaison with medical associations – had a threefold purpose: to modernize personal health, domestic hygiene and childrearing in Chinese households in the heyday of urban sanitary and public health reform in Hong Kong. By 1929, the HKYWCA had established three baby clinics that functioned as community centres that performed physical examinations of children and gave health talks on domestic hygiene and free vaccinations.Footnote 3 Eager to ‘modernize’ domestic hygiene and childrearing in Chinese homes, in October 1929, the HKYWCA held another three-day Babies’ Health Conference at its headquarters on Caine Road. The conference was open to any parents ‘who desired expert advice from experienced physicians on the care of children’. On each of the three mornings, Chinese mothers learnt modern and scientific methods of ‘bathing, clothing, and feeding’ of children from Western-trained physicians, including Drs Matha Hoahing, S.N. Chau, T.C. Wong, W.K. Fok, F.Y. Cheung, T.S. Ip and K.S. Shin. One hundred and thirty babies were examined, and 10 babies were given prizes for their ‘perfect health’, donated by Nestle and the Anglo-Swiss Milk Company.Footnote 4
The modern Chinese mother – and relatedly the broader category within which this cultural figure is situated, the Modern Chinese Woman – that the HKYWCA was so eager to produce in the inter-war period occupied a central place in the social, public and imperial imaginings in Hong Kong. In the broader context, where city-wide sanitary reform foregrounded new meanings of the domestic in the public health discourse, Chinese women’s knowledge of modern household management, sanitation and hygiene carried strategic weight in the effort to modernize domestic and urban spaces by Western-trained medical and sanitary experts. From educational sites to women’s clubs, Chinese schoolgirls, factory workers, housewives, domestic servants and professionals learnt the modern methods and practices of sanitation and hygiene. The fact that the Modern Chinese Woman as a cultural figure surfaced at this particular moment in inter-war Hong Kong and subsequently stirred and sparked new forms of Chinese women’s usefulness in public life owed much to the intersecting processes of industrial expansion, cosmopolitan urban transition and suburbanization. These distinct and connected processes redefined the meaning of the ‘household’ and women’s knowledge of modern household management in the making of modern womanhood. Hygiene knowledge, being one of the defining elements of modern femininity, in turn became a vector through which a wide spectrum of Chinese women – from elite housewives to factory workers – claimed a useful presence in the city’s sanitary and public health reforms and in public life.
This article is set against the backdrop of sanitary reform in inter-war Hong Kong. This city-wide sanitary reform rested on changing the daily hygiene habits and everyday routines of middle- and working-class Chinese households, in which equipping Chinese women with knowledge of domestic and personal hygiene became a matter of state and public concern. Modern femininity, as it was imagined by the colonial state and women’s clubs in this period, bore the weight of transforming the health of the city through transforming women’s relationship with modern hygiene and health practices. In this context, this article examines how the colonial educational scene (that is, schooling sites founded and sponsored by the colonial government) and women’s clubs of the HKYWCA actively produced the cultural figure of the Modern Chinese Woman in inter-war Hong Kong in relation to hygiene and modern health.
The colonial educational scene – examined in this article specifically through the urban English girls’ schools (as the principal strand of schooling sites where the domestic science curriculum materialized) – and the HKYWCA served a very distinct clientele. With their founding aim to provide Chinese girls with a middle-class ‘accomplishments curriculum’ that cultivated refined femininity performative in the domestic realm, urban English girls’ schools targeted Chinese girls from middle-class families.Footnote 5 As Inspector of Schools E.J. Eitel suggested, the first government school for Chinese girls—the Belilios Girls’ School—was founded in 1890 for the purpose of ‘providing an ordinary middle class English education’ for its pupils. Subjects taught included reading, arithmetic, English composition, grammar and analysis, geography, map drawing, history and needlework.Footnote 6 The curriculum of urban English girls’ schools underwent gradual changes in the inter-war period. As the accomplishments curriculum faded away and lost weight in the face of Chinese women entering higher education and the professional scene, urban English girls’ schools also incorporated an expanding stream of vocational training classes, including typewriting, stenography, accounting and first aid.Footnote 7 While vocational training in commercial classes tapped into the expanding network of offices, retail stores and institutions (such as schools and hospitals) that attracted a stream of clerks, accountants and office workers, the training on first aid closely linked with the city’s sanitary and public health reforms that increasingly relied on the expertise of medical professionals to shore up the city’s health.Footnote 8
Throughout the inter-war years, the attendance and enrolment of Chinese girls at urban English girls’ schools remained a fraction of the total number of school-age girls. As the director of education G.P. De Martin suggested in 1931, of the 21,077 girls attending schools in Hong Kong, 3,200 were in English schools (that is, schools where the medium of instruction was English that commonly had a multiracial admission); of these 3,200 girls, 260 were in the mixed schools for British children, which indicates Chinese girls accounted for over 90 per cent of the enrolment at English girls’ schools.Footnote 9 By 1939, of the total of 37,370 girls attending schools in Hong Kong,Footnote 10 4,944 were in English schools, of which 255 were girls attending the mixed schools for British children, indicating an increased percentage of Chinese girls attending English girls’ schools.Footnote 11 Instead of focusing on the expanding enrolment of Chinese girls at urban English girls’ schools and how this related to the rise of the Chinese bourgeois class and the emphasis they placed on the education of their daughters, the focus of this article is on the changing domestic science curriculum at these schools and how this responded to the urban processes of sanitary reform and suburbanization, and indeed women entering the medical domain.Footnote 12
This article argues that the discourse of hygiene, as it intersected with the cultural figure of the Modern Chinese Woman, was enacted quite differently in the colonial educational scene and the women’s club of the HKYWCA. The imperial ethic of hygiene in the colonial educational scene bore the weight of domesticity – materialized through the domestic science curriculum, before this eventually gave way to the medical training for the ‘professional nurse’. The HKYWCA, founded in 1920 as a women’s club run by Chinese women for the Chinese community (and resonating with its transnational organizational model of ‘middle-class volunteers, professional social workers and working-class clientele’), from its outset targeted a very different cluster of Chinese women.Footnote 13 By absorbing factory girls, domestic servants, housewives and mothers to experiment, practise and exercise modern health and hygiene, the association helped to transform daily hygiene practices in middle- and working-class Chinese households. By integrating groups of Chinese women who were otherwise outside the colonial educational regime into the enterprise of modern hygiene, the HKYWCA helped to produce the ‘professional nurse’ and the ‘modern Chinese mother’ from this working-class cluster of women.
The modern woman, hygiene and health in the inter-war global context: the YWCA in a new gender landscape
How central was knowledge of modern hygiene and health to the Chinese YWCA enterprise in the inter-war period? Or, more precisely, how did hygiene, health and domestic science education weigh in the YWCA programmes for Chinese women in the 1920s and 1930s? When the YWCA was first started by a group of women philanthropists in London in 1855, it was in response to middle-class moral concerns about young female working professionals bursting into the city in the phase of rapid industrialization in the Western world. Inspired by the evangelical Protestant revivalism that gave rise to the YMCA, the London YWCA was convened to bring wholesome housing and moral guidance to the city’s single, working-class women.Footnote 14 Shortly after the establishment of the London office, in 1858, the YWCA reached the shores of the United States.Footnote 15 The association offered the first boarding houses for female students, teachers and factory workers in New York City. In other cities, the YWCA offered vocational training in typewriting and sewing machine operation; employment assistance that assisted thousands of women with finding jobs; and taught English-as-a-second-language to immigrant women.Footnote 16 By the 1870s, the YWCA had started to appear in major Canadian cities. Together with women’s clubs, settlement houses, women’s colleges and organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Women’s Trade Union League, starting in the 1870s the YWCA formed part of transnational ‘female institution building’ as a characteristic of the women’s movement.Footnote 17 In 1890, the movement reached China when the first branch of the YWCA was founded at the Girl’s School of the Southern Presbyterian Mission in Hangchow. It was also around this period – the 1890s – that the World’s YWCA was formed, with branches in Norway, Sweden, Canada, Italy and India joining those in the United States and Great Britian.Footnote 18
From its founding years during industrial expansion up to World War I, the YWCA’s activities were characterized by a moral and evangelical tone. While offering accommodation and vocational support for countless industrial and professional women in urbanizing cities, the rhetoric of ‘moral guidance’ featured prominently in the YWCA programmes.Footnote 19 This evangelical tone, however, gradually faded away in the face of a new gender landscape in the inter-war transnational context. Responding to the increasingly assertive stance of women in the fields of medicine, education and urban reform using their professional expertise, in the inter-war period the YWCA contributed towards the transnational circulation of the latest developments and trends in maternal and child health, women’s health and fitness, domestic and hygiene knowledge, and women’s education and employment prospects.Footnote 20 In China, by the early 1920s, there were city branches in Peking and Shanghai, as well as the major trading ports of Tientsin, Canton, Foochow and Changsha, with a total of over 8,000 members. These city branches, weaving into and responding to this transnational circulation of knowledge and ideas, also initiated programmes promoting women’s welfare in areas such as literacy classes, vocational training, physical education and infant hygiene and nutrition.Footnote 21 As the historian Xia Shi observes, throughout the early twentieth century, the YWCA in China stressed its social service rather than an evangelical agenda. A strong emphasis on health existed in almost every YWCA city branch, with mothers’ clubs, kindergartens, baby welfare and children’s clinics and women’s clinics. There was a tendency to concentrate on the interests of the home.Footnote 22 This tendency to focus on health and daily practices in the home owed much to the redefined meaning of the ‘domestic’ and modern femininity in terms of building the health of the nation in the context of Republican-era China. It speaks simultaneously to the cultural figure of the Modern Woman in the transnational context and to the local imperatives of public health and modern hygiene, which also found global resonance in the immediate post-war period.Footnote 23
The inter-war Modern Woman: health, hygiene and modern femininity
The Modern Woman as a cultural figure, carrying the traits and controversies of both the Modern Girl and the New Woman, arrived on the global stage in the inter-war period through the intersecting processes of industrialization, cosmopolitan and urban expansion, imperial conquest and exchange, transnational mobility and migration, and technological and scientific advancement. Its global and simultaneous presence in cities from Hong Kong to New York, Shanghai to Bombay, Johannesburg to Berlin and London captured the cultural traffic and the growth of urban culture accelerated by the industrial economy in the early twentieth century.Footnote 24 As the historian Mary Louise Roberts suggests, the proliferation of the Modern Girl as a global phenomenon in the inter-war years owed much to the rise of an urban mass culture in the pre-war decades which created a transnational exchange of ideas concerning gender norms. Succeeding the New Women that had emerged in the fertile ground of feminist activism, the growth of bohemian artistic circles and the rise of women’s colleges in the 1890s, the Modern Girl stirred the public as it created new imaginings and spaces for feminine ‘transgressions’.Footnote 25
The cultural weight of the Modern Girl, from its early heavy critique by conservatives, to a much-celebrated figure by women across classes, was accelerated by urban print culture – the magazines, newspapers, pocket journals and reviews in which the Modern Girl made constant appearances and stirred public imaginings. In advertisements, featured columns and news reporting, women of the inter-war era learnt about transnational commodity and fashion trends. In Republican-era Shanghai, the historian Tani E. Barlow shows, modern women learnt how to live, be and act ‘modern’ through the everyday mastery of products such as Colgate toothpaste, Sunlight soap and Pond’s cold cream, as well as in the use of hygiene products such as chemical fertilizers, insect extinguishers and deodorants. Industrial, transnational and branded commodities both drew upon and produced new, modern and scientific femininity, which in turn invented new ways of seeing the female body. As much as the knowledge and practice of scientific birth control, domestic hygiene, physical exercise and sports emancipated the female body, they also helped define the very essence of being ‘modern’. This is related to the idea of ‘scientific’ femininity, that is, the Modern Woman was equipped with the knowledge of science, albeit science that was concerned with the trivial matters of domestic cleaning and skincare. It was about progress, improvement and betterment, on both an individual and public scale.Footnote 26
With her willingness to experiment with new commodities and household products, backed by modern science and technology, the cultural figure of the Modern Woman in the Republican-era China context and, more broadly, the discourse of modern femininity and hygiene, projected much of the nation’s transition to modernity. Resonating with Barlow, historians such as Sarah E. Stevens, Louise Edwards and Carlton Benson also pointed out the strategic cultural weight of the figure of the Modern Woman, suggesting the symbol of the modern or new Chinese women was ‘part of a modernising discourse that made possible the imagining of a new nation’.Footnote 27 This new nation, as it was imagined by Chinese male intellectuals, built on Chinese women’s modern household management skills and knowledge of the science, sanitation and hygiene of the home. As historian Helen Scheiner shows, the domestic science curriculum for Chinese girls in Republican-era China carried the state’s vision of transforming Chinese women into modern household managers. It was through them – the feminine modern household managers – that an efficient, scientific and modern home and nation were to be built.Footnote 28 In the nation’s transformation to modernity through hygienic knowledge and practice, the home, the city and the state were intimately entwined through a narrative that foregrounded the connection between everyday household practices and public health reforms. As historian Ruth Rogaski observes, hygienic modernity operated as an instrumental discourse in Republican-era China that not only shaped the building of the public health apparatus of the state such as sanitary policing, public works and state-sponsored medical institutions, but also encoded a new way of living where the private actions of the individual projected a nation’s progress and transformation to a modern state.Footnote 29 In this cultural narrative, the modern nation started with the modern household which ultimately pushed forward a connection between modern femininity, hygiene knowledge and nation building in Republican-era China.Footnote 30
The ubiquitous presence of the Modern Woman in the urban scene and in the discourse of modernity in turn foregrounded a new narrative on the connection between modern femininity, hygiene and domesticity. It resituated the domestic space as a site of scientific knowledge through which women ultimately stepped into the professional sphere. Such a trajectory was prominent in the British colonial context. As the historian Srirupa Prasad shows, domesticity was a key site where discourses on modern hygiene formalized and spatialized in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengal. Cleanliness and care – the two principal aspects of modern hygiene – ‘expressed a distinct physical, mental, and moral conception of “space” in the Bengali social and cultural imagination’ in this period. And because hygiene discourse engaged the figure of the Modern Woman or nurse, it resulted in the ‘simultaneous domestication of the professional nurse and the disciplining of the housewife’. Modern hygiene discourse, as it developed in colonial Bengal, mapped out the relationship between domesticity, personal hygiene, food and nutrition, commodity culture, nursing as well as household cleanliness, which in turn acted as a cultural signifier of upper caste Bengali domesticity.Footnote 31
In the context of inter-war Hong Kong, the cultural figure of the Modern Chinese Woman and the discourse of modern femininity, hygiene and domesticity were intimately entwined with both the Republican-era China and the British colonial contexts. This article shows that the discourse of hygiene as it intersected with the figure of the Modern Woman in inter-war Hong Kong was less concerned with untangling and detaching women from the domestic scene than it was with equipping women with knowledge of modern hygiene, through which they ultimately claimed a professional and public presence. Domesticity is not necessarily an idea that inhibited the Modern Woman, but rather, becoming an expert of domestic hygiene, health and household cleanliness came to be a defining element in the training of Chinese women to be modern in the inter-war period, both by the colonial educational scene and women’s clubs. The figure of the Modern Chinese Woman, this article shows, proliferated in inter-war Hong Kong in the context of modernizing the domestic and urban space by Western-trained medical and sanitary experts. This in turn captured the specific sites and spaces where modern practices of health and hygiene took shape, and the modern and scientific femininity that drove and emerged through them.
Hygiene, domestic science education and the Modern Woman in the educational context
Domestic science education has an extended history in the British colonial context. In colonial Hong Kong, as historian Patricia Chiu shows, the discourse of domesticity was implicated in the dual mission of ‘evangelising and civilising colonial subjects’ in the Victorian era of empire expansion. Domestic skills were portrayed as ‘useful knowledge’ for working-class Chinese girls, who were the central focus of missionary girls’ schools in Hong Kong during the nineteenth century (that is, prior to the founding of government English girls’ schools for Chinese girls; after this the client of urban English girls’ schools shifted mainly to middle-class and merchants’ daughtersFootnote 32). Typical domestic skills subjects in this period include cooking, washing, ironing and needlework.Footnote 33 By the inter-war period, the domestic science curriculum at urban English girls’ schools was adapted to incorporate training in first-aid and nursing that helped prepare a cohort of locally trained Chinese female medical professionals. While in the Republican-era China context, domestic science education was folded into the narrative of the modern nation, in inter-war Hong Kong, domestic training was more closely connected with the city-wide sanitary reforms and the bursting of the Chinese women onto the professional scene.
Domestic science, the hygiene education curriculum and the professional nurse
Hygiene education, as a specific branch of domestic science education, at urban English girls’ schools in colonial Hong Kong took shape in the context of urban sanitary reform. By the turn of the twentieth century, the British colonial government in Hong Kong was struggling with the provision of health infrastructure for the urban working class whose living quarters were criticized by sanitary experts as breeding grounds for contagious diseases.Footnote 34 At the time, the city was still in recovery from the bubonic plague outbreak in 1894 that claimed 2,426 lives – in just the first two months of the outbreak. The plague subsequently paralyzed the economy of whole city.Footnote 35 In an investigation into the causes of the outbreak, the medical officer Dr James A. Lowson suggested the structural defects of working-class tenements, coupled with the unsanitary living habits of the residents, contributed directly to the rapid spread of the plague in the Chinese quarters.Footnote 36 By pathologizing the domestic site, medical experts such as Dr Lowson underwrote a series of sanitary interventions in working-class dwellings which included compulsory domestic cleansing, sanitary inspection and building regulations.Footnote 37 It was in this context of sanitizing working-class homes that the household and the domestic space emerged as primary sites for the conceptualization and practice of modern ideas on hygiene and personal health in colonial Hong Kong.
Immediately following the outbreaks of the bubonic plague in 1894 and 1901, in 1903, the Public Health and Building Ordinance was passed to ensure the minimum hygiene and sanitary standards in buildings used for domestic, commercial and industrial purposes.Footnote 38 In 1905, an outline scheme for the teaching of hygiene in government schools was drawn up by the medical officer of health Dr W.W. Pearse.Footnote 39 The scheme covered four principal aspects: domestic hygiene; personal hygiene; eating and drinking; and illness. Pupils were instructed on the cleaning of rooms and furniture; on cleanliness, carriage, posture, change of clothing and bedding, quiet speech and restraint; on food preparation and preservation; and on disease prevention and how to deal with minor illness.Footnote 40 By making hygiene a compulsory subject at all government and grant-in-aid English schools (that is, schools sponsored by the colonial government through a grant-in-aid scheme), this new form of hygiene knowledge was introduced to middle-class children.Footnote 41 To stimulate the learning of the subject, Governor Sir Matthew Nathan (1904–1907) offered prizes and a trophy to be awarded in the annual hygiene examination, and to be held for one year.Footnote 42 Through these initial incentives, it was hoped that hygiene education in schools would encourage the circulation of hygienic practices and change daily routines in Chinese homes. As Inspector of Schools E.D.C. Wolfe suggested in 1908, ‘in almost all schools the subject [hygiene] had been carefully studied and if only children will bear in mind what they have learnt when they leave school the teaching of this subject should materially assist in securing the cooperation of the Chinese in the matter of sanitation in the colony’.Footnote 43
The curriculum for hygiene at urban English girls’ schools in this initial stage (the 1900s) focused on shaping a new rhythm and practice of daily life according to modern and hygienic principles. Home and the domestic domain were the primary sites in which the discourse and principles of modern hygiene materialized. Hygiene knowledge that was useful in specific domestic spaces such as the kitchen, living room and laundry all received attention. Knowledge on food preparation and preservation, cleaning of rooms and furniture, change of clothing and bedding, and the care of wounds very much emphasized and engaged the discourse of modern femininity and the modern feminine figure as being in command of scientific household knowledge. By mapping out the relationship between domestic hygiene, personal hygiene, dieting, illness and home nursing, the hygiene curriculum at English girls’ schools initiated a new mode of daily life for the home that emphasized the connection between domestic health and public health.
Guided by the idea that domestic science and hygiene are ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical’ subjects, the teaching of domestic knowledge at urban English girls’ schools gradually expanded from textbook learning to emphasize more ‘hands-on’ practices.Footnote 44 At the Belilios Public School for Chinese girls, a government girls’ school, for example, by the 1910s, pupils were trained on the hygienic importance of ‘fresh air in the classrooms, boiled water in the filters, cleanliness of persons and apparel (avoidance of disease dangers)’. In the upper school, practical lessons were given, using simple apparatus, on nursing and sick-room matters generally.Footnote 45 Additional subjects such as laundry and cookery were all part of this practical training on domestic knowledge.Footnote 46 By the 1910s, the teaching of practical domestic skills also integrated a new scientific approach to health and hygiene that aimed to equip Chinese girls for the technologically saturated modern suburban home. In cookery classes, for example, pupils first received detailed instructions as to methods and reasons, and then proceeded to practical work. Gas stoves were used as well as saucepans and dishes.Footnote 47 In the practical laundry class, pupils were taught to wash, starch and iron their own handkerchiefs and aprons and mastered the skills in a very short space of time.Footnote 48
Focusing on everyday hygiene practices, from cooking, laundry and ironing clothes to boiling water, dusting and cleaning furniture, caring for wounds and nursing, the domestic science curriculum at urban English girls’ schools in the 1900s and 1910s reflected how medical experts such as Dr Pearse thought about and formulated responses to the urgent sanitary and public health concerns in Hong Kong in line with the hygiene science of the day. This line of training in practical homemaking skills was taught together with subjects on the causes and prevention of local recurring epidemics such as tuberculosis, beri-beri and smallpox.Footnote 49 The schools thus performed an important public health function by circulating knowledge on the prevention of infectious diseases to Chinese homes.
Equipped with scientific knowledge and the practical skills of modern hygiene, Chinese schoolgirls gradually emerged as a ‘modern nurse’ figure in both the domestic and public domains. As early as the 1910s, together with the courses on cookery, laundry and home nursing, pupils in urban English girls’ schools were instructed on providing first aid to the injured.Footnote 50 These first aid lectures were linked with certification at the end of the course. In 1918, at the Italian Convent (founded by the Canossian Sisters of Charity in 1860, with pupils who were chiefly Chinese and Portuguese), for example, Dr V.M. Kooh lectured classes on home nursing. In an examination held at the Royal Naval Hospital, with Deputy Surgeon General Dreaper as the honourable examiner, all the candidates from the Italian Convent were successful.Footnote 51 At the Diocesan Girls’ School (founded by the Anglican Church in 1860 for the care of girls of mixed parentage, which later had multiracial admission), lectures on home nursing and first aid were also offered. In 1922, for example, 23 girls passed the Home Nursing examination that was connected with the St John Ambulance Association.Footnote 52
With medical training and certification in first aid and home nursing, Chinese schoolgirls were introduced to and equipped with Western methods of dealing with accidents and sickness for the first time.Footnote 53 Taught together with lectures on the prevention of infectious diseases and hygiene matters, this line of preparatory nursing training captured the overlap between new laboratory science, medical practice and hygienic approaches to health in inter-war Hong Kong.Footnote 54 By the 1920s, senior Chinese girls undertaking preparatory nursing courses were integrated into the medical network that supported public health campaigns such as vaccination. In 1921, for example, the Victoria Nursing Division of the St John Ambulance Brigade at Belilios Public School (formed in 1918) had recruited 31 members from the staff and senior pupils.Footnote 55 Every year, this Division was on duty at various public occasions. In 1927, for example, members of the Division performed 124 vaccinations for women and children at the school and at the HKYWCA.Footnote 56 This practical training as well as other foundational nursing courses in secondary girls’ schools was in part a preparation for the nursing workforce at hospitals. By 1928, Miss H.F. Skinner, headmistress at Belilios Public School, suggested that there were five past pupils of the school now working as probationary nurses at the Government Civil Hospital and two past pupils nursing at other hospitals.Footnote 57 The public medical services provided by Chinese female professionals thus moved apace with medical training in the educational context. As the historian Elizabeth Littell-Lamb suggests, in the inter-war period, women increasingly used their newly acquired ‘professional expertise to define their authority and businesslike language to defend their involvement in public life’.Footnote 58 Here vaccination campaigns, and medical work among women and children more broadly, became a specific area of public life that Chinese female medical professionals carved out for themselves, using their expertise in modern health care.
By placing nursing within the discourse of domesticity and the domestic domain, and by engaging with Western traditions of medical care, domestic science as a subject in urban English girls’ schools laid the foundation for subsequent nursing training in the medical domain. Originating as part of the domestic science curriculum for middle-class Chinese girls, nursing as a career choice experienced rapid growth in the inter-war years. The census records suggest that in 1921 there were 61 Chinese female nurses as well as 27 British female nurses and 19 other non-Chinese female nurses – a total of 107 nurses.Footnote 59 By 1931, the number of Chinese female nurses had grown to 235, with a total of 357 nurses in Hong Kong in 1931, 100 being European females and 22 being other non-Chinese females.Footnote 60 This growth took shape within the broader context of the expansion of medical infrastructure in the city, which in turn captured the role medical professionals played in improving the health and sanitation of the city.Footnote 61
By the late 1930s, equipped with professional medical knowledge, Chinese women emerged in the city’s clinical and medical spaces as avid practitioners for modern health. As a former graduate of Belilios Public School, Molly Chiu (b. 1923) suggested, during her school years students there gave priority to studying as preparation for future employment. At the time, many of Molly’s classmates left school to get married, but there were some girls who planned to go to university. About half of Molly’s classmates went out to work in many different fields such as office work in foreign or Chinese companies, government jobs as well as teaching and nursing posts, for which female staff had just begun to be recruited. Molly suggested that at that time Queen Mary Hospital had recruited a lot of her seniors from Belilios Public School. During the Japanese occupation, many of those who had worked at Queen Mary Hospital went to Chongqing, a city in southwest China, to continue their work as nurses and to start studying medicine. Molly’s elder sister also studied at Belilios Public School before undertaking a four-year nursing training course at Kwong Wah Hospital at the age of 15 and later a midwifery course at Tung Wah Eastern Hospital for two years. After qualifying as a nurse and midwife, she worked at Tsan Yuk Hospital after the war.Footnote 62 The city-wide sanitary and public health reforms in inter-war Hong Kong thus absorbed a stream of locally trained Chinese female medical professionals. It both drew upon and was driven by notions of modern femininity that in turn created new forms of feminine usefulness in public life.
Domestic science and the suburban home maker
While professional training became a dominant theme in urban English girls’ schools in inter-war Hong Kong, the domestic science curriculum also leaned towards and linked with training for medical professionals. However, this is not to say that the domestic science curriculum at urban English girls’ schools entirely lost its function to train the ‘modern house manager’. Even in the heyday of preparatory nursing courses being integrated into the school curriculum, courses on cookery, laundry and housewifery proved to be popular, as the inspector of English schools observed. At the Belilios Public School for Chinese Girls, for example, in 1921, the inspector of English schools Mr E. Ralphs observed that ‘cookery continues to flourish; a new kitchen has been built and is much appreciated’.Footnote 63 By 1926, the subject of housewifery was introduced into the curriculum at Belilios Public School. The pupils taking the course were ‘responsible for supervising the entire cleanliness and freshness of the building and the washing of paint and curtains, cleaning of windows, polishing of floors and care of plants in the cookery compound’. Laundry work was also included in the housewifery course.Footnote 64 In 1927, the newly built St Paul’s Girls’ College also included a model kitchen. It was intended, ‘besides instruction in English and Chinese, to give the students a thorough course in domestic science’.Footnote 65 At the Diocesan Girls’ School as well, in 1929, a kitchen for girls to practise cookery and other practical parts of their domestic science course was being constructed, and laundry room being enlarged.Footnote 66
By this period, the teaching of domestic science in urban English girls’ schools was less concerned with preparing Chinese girls solely for domestic life than it was with equipping the schoolgirls with knowledge of modern health and hygiene, and through them to shore up the health practices in Chinese households. As the suburban home was modernized by new interior design practices, new electric home appliances, modern flush and bathing systems, tennis courts and gardens, the domestic science curriculum at English girls’ schools was foregrounding a new mode of daily life that was adaptive to the technologically saturated modern home.Footnote 67 In the broader context where everyday life was scientized, routinized and quantified for the building of public health, Chinese girls at urban English girls’ schools were taught about the everyday maintenance of health, caring of the body, household remedies for common ailments and care of children. Knowledge of hygiene, as proliferated through the domestic science curriculum at urban English girls’ schools in inter-war Hong Kong, thus enacted the simultaneous professionalization of nursing and the modernizing of health practices in the domestic space.
Hygiene, the household and the HKYWCA’s health programme
The modern domestic space and household in inter-war Hong Kong was in part produced by the new technologies and products that foregrounded hygiene. Modern suburban homes were planned and built with electricity, gas and water supplies that supported the installation of gas stoves and ovens, refrigerators, electric fans, a flush system and European-style bathrooms.Footnote 68 It was in this context of modernizing domestic architecture through sanitation technology that the domestic space and household became among the first sites where modern hygiene and health practices were formalized and spatialized. In this context, the colonial education scene functioned as a key source of hygiene and health advice for middle-class Chinese girls. Through its extensive domestic science education curriculum that circulated scientific principles of modern health, Chinese girls at urban English girls’ schools emerged as the ‘modern nurse’ figure in both the domestic and professional domains.
And yet, the health and hygiene of the suburban households very much relied on domestic servants who performed the daily cooking, cleaning, dusting, laundry and caring tasks. In the context of industrial expansion where the city attracted a steady stream of female factory workers to support its manufacturing industry, suburban and urban Hong Kong also experienced an increase in the Chinese female population.Footnote 69 In the densely populated working-class districts where Chinese factory girls worked, the HKYWCA emerged as a key source of domestic science knowledge and health and hygiene advice. By absorbing factory girls and domestic servants into its night classes where reading and writing, hygiene and health, and home making were taught, the HKYWCA was simultaneously helping to modernize the health of working-class homes and the middle-class households in which domestic servants worked. Focusing specifically on the health of Chinese women and children, the YWCA in inter-war Hong Kong further concerned itself with modernizing mothercraft and childrearing in Chinese homes. The household and the domestic space as they were framed by the HKYWCA thus served a threefold function of modernizing personal health, domestic hygiene and childrearing, all of which drew upon and enacted the figure of the Modern Woman.
YWCA’s clients: modernizing the health practice of the urban working class
Similar to the founding of the YWCA in the Western context, the HKYWCA was also born in an industrial economy that drew in working-class Chinese women who had newly migrated to urban and suburban Hong Kong. As the census records suggest, beginning in the 1900s, partly responding to the industrial expansion in the city – particularly the newly developed Kowloon industrial districts such as Yaumati which were home to the manufacture of hosiery and knitted goods – Hong Kong attracted a growing stream of Chinese female workers migrating from the neighbouring provinces such as Kwangtung.Footnote 70 By 1921, the total number of Chinese females in urban Hong Kong (including Hong Kong Island and the newly developed Kowloon Peninsula) reached 163,213 (with 265,997 Chinese males). Of the urban Chinese female population, 1,801 were employed in the manufacture of textiles and textile goods and 14,583 in the manufacture of clothing. Personal service work such as cooking, domestic service and laundry work remained the largest employing sector for Chinese women, which absorbed 19,095 females. There were also a few employed in a professional capacity, of whom 20 Chinese females were employed as doctors in Chinese practice, 73 as hospital attendants, 59 as midwives, 61 as trained nurses, 67 in religious work and 324 as teachers.Footnote 71
Recognizing the lack of social networks and infrastructure to support these diverse and distinct groups of Chinese women, in 1918, a group of six Chinese women convened to discuss an initiative to start a city association of the YWCA in Hong Kong. Later, ‘some teachers, some mothers, and some women from various churches’ formed a pre-organization committee. The committee sought advice from the National General Secretary of the YWCA in China, Miss Grace Coppock, who was passing through on her way to Canton, and she said, ‘secure a Chinese secretary first, then the National Committee will send a Western secretary’.Footnote 72 The committee recruited as the Chinese secretary Miss Shin Tak Hing, a former teacher at the Belilios Public School for Chinese Girls.Footnote 73 The National Committee of the YWCA in China sent as the foreign secretary Miss Nellie Elliott who was Canadian.Footnote 74 After this preparatory work, the Chinese YWCA in Hong Kong was officially started in April 1920. A Board of Directors comprising 12 elected Chinese women was responsible for the work of the local branch in Hong Kong. Footnote 75 The association was affiliated with the National YWCA of China and the World’s YWCA at Geneva.Footnote 76
From its founding days, equipping working-class Chinese women with knowledge of modern health and hygiene, and through them to modernize the health of the urban working-class home, had been a dominant theme in the various branches of the educational work undertaken by the HKYWCA. In the inter-war years, this health education programme was carried out primarily through the following sites: a day school (at the YWCA Centre) offering vocational training which included first aid, home nursing and cookery classes; a night school (at the YWCA Centre) offering classes on literacy and health and hygiene matters for amahs (female domestic help), servants and mui-tsais (domestic bond-servant girls); night schools for factory girls in working-class districts; and health weeks for girls and women. Each of these educational and health programmes targeted and served a distinct group of urban working-class women.
In the broader context where Chinese women were becoming a useful presence in the professional and public realm, the HKYWCA also positioned itself as a source of vocational training. In the day school, as early as 1921, classes had been conducted in language, vocational training, arts and physical education. Subjects taught included Chinese, Mandarin, English, home nursing, first aid, needlework, music, drawing and physical training, with a total enrolment of 156. Of these, home nursing and first aid classes were linked to certification.Footnote 77 In its first year, in the first term nine out of a class of 45 took the examination in Home Nursing held at the Tung Wah Hospital, and in the second term six took the examination in First Aid and two in Home Nursing.Footnote 78 In the following years, through the day school, the HKYWCA would help train a steady stream of medical care givers. In 1926, for example, 11 members of the class in First Aid passed the St John’s Ambulance test and ‘will be awarded certificates’.Footnote 79 By 1928, the HKYWCA had established its own Nursing Division of the St John Ambulance Brigade. Commenting on this branch of medical and educational work, Mr E. Ralphs, the inspector of English schools at the Board of Education, emphasized its value to the home. He suggested that ‘members of such a Division put themselves in a position to serve the community as well as the home’. Forty-one certificates were presented that year, 24 for First Aid, 12 for Home Nursing and five for third year First Aid.Footnote 80 By training Chinese girls who were otherwise outside the colonial educational regime of modern hygiene in Western traditions of medical care, the HKYWCA day school helped usher its pupils into modern nursing roles in the domestic as well as the professional domains.
By the 1930s, in addition to the day school that circulated modern hygiene knowledge with an orientation of a professional outlook, the HKYWCA also established night schools both in its Association Building and in working-class districts near factories. In 1930, for example, there were 40 girls studying in the four night classes at the YWCA centre, which were graded according to a four-year primary course, each class with a teacher in charge. The pupils were mostly amahs, servants and mui-tsais. They came to class once a week to study, sometimes relieved by a little recreation or a talk.Footnote 81 In addition, there were ‘popular education’ night schools for working-class girls at Yaumati, Causeway Bay, High Street, Pokfulum Road and Ladder Street.Footnote 82 These night schools provided classes in reading and writing, health and hygiene, homemaking and recreation.Footnote 83 By 1934, the popular education night schools and one day school for ‘poor girls’ had reached a total enrolment of 263. Personal and home hygiene were included in the elementary course provided for them, and through the follow-up work in the girls’ homes by Miss Leung (a teacher in the Educational Department of the HKYWCA) they were given advice along health lines and the care of children.Footnote 84 Home visits, to supplement teaching on domestic science, functioned as forms of medical and sanitary intervention into the health of working-class households. As Miss Shin Tak-hing, general secretary of the HKYWCA, suggested in 1936, the Board of Directors found the night schools that offered practical domestic science to be:
one of the most worthwhile pieces of social work to promote in the colony, for through contact with these girls we can get into their homes and get to know their families and see in what way we can help them. We are training this younger generation of working girls to be better mothers and housewives…Footnote 85
By 1939, when the total membership of the HKYWCA had reached 1,000, there were four of these night schools run by the HKYWCA for factory girls, who had to earn their living in the daytime by making torches, rubber shoes, cigarettes and by weaving cloth and rattan baskets. Situated at Sai Ying Pun, Wanchai, Causeway Bay and Shaukiwan, these schools not only provided the girls with an elementary knowledge of reading and writing, but also practical hygiene and domestic science.Footnote 86 The HKYWCA’s domestic science courses thus helped to shore up the daily hygiene practices not only in the middle-class households where servant girls worked, but also in the households of the working-class girls who had newly migrated to Hong Kong either from the rural countryside or from neighbouring provinces. The courses had the intention to change working-class girls’ daily practices according to middle-class values, with domesticity being a key element.
The night classes were important in defining the HKYWCA as a key source of health advice for working-class Chinese women. Located near factories, and with an emphasis on the health of the home, the night schools contributed to the broader public health effort. In connection with the YMCA and the medical associations, the HKYWCA also held an annual health week for all women and girls when they could be examined by doctors and nurses and given health advice when needed.Footnote 87 While most of the educational and medical work was carried out by a group of locally trained volunteer teachers, doctors and nurses, in the 1930s the HKYWCA also recruited professional instructors in domestic science who had trained overseas to disseminate the latest developments in domestic and housekeeping knowledge. In 1937, for example, a course of eight lessons in European cookery for ‘cook-boys’ and amahs commenced. These lessons were conducted by Miss Lee Wan, a former student of the Good Housekeeping Institute of New York. Miss Lee had over 12 years’ experience in the teaching of cooking and had specialized in the making of French dishes. The households who subscribed to these courses wished to have their cook-boys or amahs equipped with the skills to use modern European kitchen appliances.Footnote 88 These cookery courses not only capture the changing material conditions of suburban homes in inter-war Hong Kong, they also illuminate the HKYWCA’s capacity to devise vocational training classes that were responsive to the everyday needs of the modern home.
Baby clinics, health weeks and modern motherhood
Through the night schools that offered domestic science courses to factory girls and domestic servants, the HKYWCA equipped working-class Chinese girls with modern hygiene knowledge, thus transforming factory and servant girls into the broader category of the Modern Chinese Woman who exercised and practised hygiene in daily life. Knowledge and practice of hygiene in inter-war Hong Kong in turn acted as a tool through which a wide spectrum of Chinese women transitioned into modern womanhood. The household knowledge disseminated through the colonial educational scene and women’s clubs further captured Hong Kong’s broader transition of sanitary reform that built upon changing the daily hygiene routines and practices of working-class and middle-class households. As a women’s club that focused specifically on the daily life and hygiene practices of Chinese women, throughout the inter-war years the HKYWCA further campaigned for modernizing mothercraft and childrearing, transforming the household and the domestic space into sites where the everyday bathing, feeding, clothing, resting and exercising of children became spatialized, quantified and routinized.Footnote 89
This framing of domestic space and the household as key sites for the modernization of mothercraft and childrearing indeed overlapped with the broader eugenics concern in the British imperial context. As the historian Anna Davin shows, already by the 1890s some municipalities in Britain were distributing leaflets on infant care and providing instructions through visits to women’s homes. In the wake of the disastrous Boer War, fears around the poor physique of recruits reached a peak. This triggered legislative measures designed to improve the conditions of infant and child health, among which midwives were required to have training and school children were to be medically inspected.Footnote 90 In Republican-era China, the historian Margaret Mih Tillman shows that childhood also functioned as a key site for the modernization of the nation. The better baby contests organized by the YWCA in China in this period, as Tillman argues, celebrated new material conditions and public hygiene facilitated by modern industry. The contest shows how everyday practices, such as feeding and bathing infants, were reinterpreted according to metrics of public health in an imagined international competition to achieve modernity.Footnote 91 These two broader contexts – one shaping the colonial state’s approach to child health, the other shaping the HKYWCA’s approach to childrearing – intersected to shore up the childrearing practices in Chinese homes in inter-war Hong Kong.
In fact, the HKYWCA played a key role in formalizing and materializing eugenics thinking and practices in inter-war Hong Kong. As early as 1921, a course on home making, designed to be of special help to mothers in looking after the moral as well as the physical wellbeing of their children, was offered at the HKYWCA day school.Footnote 92 By 1923, the HKYWCA had opened its first baby clinic where children under two could be brought in every two weeks to be weighed and examined by a doctor.Footnote 93 Soon a second baby clinic at the YMCA and a third one on Nathan Road in Kowloon were opened to be ‘nearer to the poor districts’.Footnote 94 These initial steps marked the beginning of disseminating scientific methods of childrearing to Chinese homes.
In the following years, the HKYWCA acted as a space that brought together mercantile companies, female medical professionals, including doctors and nurses, and Chinese mothers in an effort to modernize everyday childrearing practices in Chinese homes. Exhibits consisted of charts, posters and pamphlets, and objects such as milk powders and clothing were organized to equip Chinese mothers with knowledge of the broader international trends and scientific developments in maternal and child health. In 1924, for example, the HKYWCA organized its first Children’s Health Conference. A cohort of leading physicians, including Dr S. To Wong, Dr Wan Man Kai, Mrs I. Mitchell MD, Dr Gladys Fraser and Dr T.P. Woo, formed the committee. The general secretary Miss Nellie Elliott suggested that the four-day conference, which recorded an average daily attendance of 90, was convened to ‘give parents of the community an opportunity of learning facts with regard to the care of their children’. Professional advice on everyday childrearing tasks was delivered in the form of physical demonstration and lectures. There were exhibitions by physicians on ‘bathing, clothing, and feeding’ as well as lectures on ‘the care of the mother and the child’.Footnote 95
In the baby clinic, in addition to physical examination and treatment of babies, baby welfare talks were given fortnightly to the mothers on ‘feeding, growth and development, vaccination, teething, common ailments and emergencies and their treatment’. Each baby visiting the clinics had their own record book and in 1929, a total of 1,305 babies were helped.Footnote 96 In various cases where further attention was required, the mothers were visited by a Chinese nurse, when follow-up practical instruction was given.Footnote 97 In the same year, marking a further step in modernizing childrearing, a mother’s study group of over 20 young matrons was started. At their fortnightly meetings, group discussions were carried out on topics such home hygiene, decoration, recreation, social life, home relationships, education for children and the ideal home.Footnote 98 In this period, through the baby clinic and Children’s Welfare Conference, the HKYWCA became an important source of preventive medicine for Chinese women and children. The baby clinics were attended not only by Chinese mothers, but also by the babies’ amahs, because the ‘the baby amahs learn as much as the mothers from their visits to the clinic’.Footnote 99 In connection with the Health Campaign week, the HKYWCA also ran a weekly vaccination clinic for the prevention of smallpox, where in 1930 a total number of over 900 children were vaccinated.Footnote 100
By the 1930s, with the establishment of the Hong Kong Eugenics League, the HKYWCA was further concerned with the ‘ultra-modern experiment’ of imparting eugenics knowledge to Chinese mothers.Footnote 101 In this period, much of the health advice circulated by the health campaigns organized by the HKYWCA captured the broader medical research and advancement in women’s and children’s health, and the transnational network that disseminated this medical knowledge. The ‘household’, as framed by the HKYWCA in inter-war Hong Kong, in turn reflects how women’s knowledge of the domestic space functioned as a solution to a sanitary as well as a social problem. Equipping working-class Chinese women with knowledge of domestic hygiene and family planning became a way to modernize the urban slums. Such framing also resonated with the founding aim of the Hong Kong Eugenics League. The League, founded in 1936 by Dr W.C.W. Nixon, a member of the Medical Committee of the National Birth Control Association of Great Britain, existed for ‘the purpose of placing within the reach of the poor knowledge of modern contraceptive methods and medical skill in their application’.Footnote 102 Forming a node in the transnational network that circulated eugenics knowledge, the Hong Kong Eugenics League was affiliated with the International Birth Control League (of London and New York), the National Birth Control Association (of London) and the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau (of New York).Footnote 103
In the 1930s, the HKYWCA became an important medium through which the leaflets of the Hong Kong Eugenics League reached Chinese mothers, along with the government hospitals, maternal and child welfare centres and Chinese hospitals.Footnote 104 The HKYWCA’s work on women and child health in the inter-war years in turn filled an important gap in medical provision for Chinese women and children in Hong Kong. By the late 1930s, when the colonial government and many private hospitals started to include maternity and children’s wards, the HKYWCA changed its methods. The association started to mobilize a cohort of nurses and physicians to perform home visits instead of asking mothers to come to the baby clinics. The nurses talked to the mothers ‘individually about the care of children’ and recommended medical institutions for follow-up checks and treatments should they be needed.Footnote 105 By then, medical care for Chinese women and children had gradually moved from the clinic spaces of women’s clubs into the institutional space of colonial medicine, capturing the growth and expansion of colonial medical care.
Conclusion
The Modern Chinese Woman as a cultural figure in inter-war Hong Kong emerged through the intersecting processes of industrial expansion, cosmopolitan urban transition and suburbanization. These distinct and connected processes redefined the meaning of the household and women’s knowledge of modern household management in the making of modern womanhood. As broader sanitary reform in inter-war Hong Kong rested on changing the daily hygiene habits and everyday routines in middle- and working-class Chinese households, equipping Chinese women with knowledge of domestic and personal hygiene became a matter of state and public concern. Modern femininity as it was imagined by the colonial state and women’s clubs in this period bore the weight of transforming the health of the city through transforming women’s relationship with modern hygiene and health practices. It was indeed through Chinese schoolgirls, factory girls, mothers, housewives and domestic servants that hygiene practices in middle- and working-class households became spatialized, routinized and quantified.
As this article shows, the colonial educational scene primarily concerned itself with changing the hygiene practices of middle-class Chinese schoolgirls. The idea of hygiene initially intersected with the discourse of domesticity that underlined the spread and growth of domestic science curriculum at urban English girls’ schools before this eventually gave way to professional training in nursing. Knowledge of domestic hygiene, home nursing, first aid, cookery, laundry, and food and nutrition as they were disseminated through the domestic science curriculum in English girls’ schools not only illuminates the specific sites and practices of hygiene in which medical experts intervened and transformed, but also the Modern Chinese Woman figure that emerged with them.
Also framing the household as the primary site where modern hygiene knowledge and practices formalized, the HKYWCA, on the other hand, was keen to modernize the hygiene practices of factory girls, domestic servants, housewives and mothers: groups of women who were otherwise outside the colonial educational regime of hygiene. In the day and night schools for factory girls and domestic servants, domestic science courses were introduced to shore up the daily hygiene practices of the urban working-class Chinese girls. These courses, supplemented by home visits, had the intention to change working-class girls’ daily practices according to middle-class values, with domesticity being a key element. Acting as a node in the transnational network that disseminated the latest medical research and advancement in women’s and children’s health, in the inter-war years the HKYWCA further campaigned to modernize mothercraft and childrearing in Chinese homes, transforming the household and the domestic space into a site where the everyday bathing, feeding, clothing, resting and exercising of children became restructured according to scientific metrics. The Modern Chinese Woman in inter-war Hong Kong came into being in the context of modernizing domestic and urban spaces by Western-trained medical experts. This in turn captured the specific sites and spaces where modern practices of health and hygiene took shape, and the modern and scientific femininity that drove them.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions.
Funding statement
The research for this article was supported by the Post-doctoral Fellowship Matching Fund Scheme at the Education University of Hong Kong.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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