Gender and Education in China: Gender Discourses and Women's Schooling in the Early Twentieth Century. By Paul J. Bailey. New York: Routledge, 2006. x, 246 pp. $160.00 (cloth).

Describing the subject of female education in China from 1898 to 1920 as a neglected topic, Paul J. Bailey offers the reader a window into the complex phenomenon of girls' schooling in those decades of fast-paced educational reforms (primary female education was officially sanctioned in 1907, secondary education in 1912, and higher education in 1919–20) and increasing public visibility for women. Bailey is known for his work on educational reform in early twentieth-century China, and his latest volume is filled with useful and fascinating details on the schools—from statistics on school and student numbers in different provinces and periods, to discussions of the various spaces appropriated as school sites, to the students, their attire, allegedly bad behavior, and sense of social justice, and even to nonstudents, including prostitutes and women workers.This wealth of material is more often recorded than interpreted, however. The book is arranged chronologically, a structure that has its own logic but leads to repetition and the dispersal of potentially coherent themes. While the subtitle suggests that the book will examine a plurality of gender discourses, Bailey focuses on “one particular and pervasive strand of thinking” (p. 120) across the period, “modernizing conservatism,” a term taken from Ernest Young's book on Yuan Shikai (The Presidency of Yuan Shih-k'ai: Liberalism and Dictatorship in Early Republican China [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977]). The sources of this discourse, as Bailey describes it, were threefold: the Chinese statecraft tradition, together with Japanese and American approaches to women's education. Its aim was to produce skilled household managers who would indirectly contribute to the state-building project by rejuvenating “traditional” female virtues, correcting female character deficiencies, and ensuring that women received a (small) dose of (utilitarian) modern knowledge. The urgency of the discourse intensified in the early years of the republic as the unruliness of female students allegedly increased in tandem with their numbers. The discourse remained powerful during the May Fourth era, when, Bailey contends, it was at least as prevalent as the radical gender discourse more often associated with this period.Bailey's main argument—that the persistence of this discourse counters the teleological narrative of the radicalization of Chinese thought in the early twentieth century—is convincing. “Modernizing conservatism” is presented as so omnipresent, however, that it ultimately has little explanatory power. He finds traces of it across the period, the political spectrum, and the range of periodicals and textbooks that he examines. He does not detect differences in the ways and reasons it was invoked by, for example, the late Qing official Zhang Zhidong, the educational reformer Cai Yuanpei, the radical journal Jiangsu, or the staid Ladies' Journal. He makes little effort to distinguish among the editorial positions of specific journals or to identify the authors of the many essays examined (and unfortunately, neither the glossary nor the bibliography includes characters for names). What Bailey does detect, however, are countless paradoxes that are repeatedly highlighted but not probed (pp. 58, 59, 60, 64, 99, 125). Such paradoxes are not unique to early Chinese feminism, and it might have been useful to examine how other scholars—Joan Scott and Denise Riley, for example—have unpacked them in different historical contexts.What is most problematic, however, is the author's contention that this discourse gives us access to women's voices (pp. 9, 124), which are ostensibly silent on the subject of education in all other sources—he cites memoirs, for example. Admittedly, the increasingly shrill, feverish, and paranoid (all Bailey's words) male discourse on female students was a reaction to something, but, as he admits, it tells us mostly about male insecurities and fears. We have less chance of recuperating women's elusive voices in the polemical lead journal essays on which Bailey focuses than in other media, including fiction (not used as fully as it could have been), reader's letters (Hu Binxia's letter on vocational education in Jiaoyu zazhi 1, no. 6 [1909], for example), and, perhaps most importantly, poetry, which was featured in all early twentieth-century women's journals and remained a crucial mode of female self-expression. Finally, given the author's focus on representations of female students, it is unfortunate that, in addition to the wonderful woodblock print and two textbook illustrations that he includes, he does not offer more analysis or reproductions of the abundant images of female students in the mainstream, women's, and popular pictorial press.The book is generally accurate, but some errors bear correcting: The first women's journal, for example, was founded in 1898 (recognized on p. 19), not 1902 (noted on p. 51); the author of the quotation on page 58 is Chen Yiyi (identified in the secondary source Bailey cites), not Chen Xiefen. The book is short but dense, with packed sentences and lengthy notes. It is a rich read that offers scholars who are interested in Chinese women during the early twentieth century a wealth of potential avenues for research.

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