BUILDING THE NATION THROUGH WOMEN'S HEALTH: MODERN ...

of midwifery students, as we will see in Chapter Five, portray women with permed and bobbed
hair, makeup, Western clothes, and plucked eyebrows. How did the New Life Movement
reconcile these conflicting notions of the ideal traditional, conservative woman with the modern,
educated woman so necessary to help revitalize the nation? Did they expect educated women to
wear braids and traditional clothing, to shun all aspects of Westernization except medicine and
public health? While the Guomindang during the Nanjing Decade turned towards conservatism,
it also utilized women to help build the nation.
A major goal of the movement was to improve the health of the Chinese people and, in
turn, create a healthier China. Footbinding and breast binding were both illegal under the
Guomindang, and in 1934 the importance of woman’s “healthy beauty,” as opposed to the
traditional ideal of “fragile beauty,” was “promoted by the state as the new norm of
femininity.” 284 The movement advocated physical education for men and women. In fact,
PUMC’s First National Midwifery School built a “playground” in which its students could play
basketball and other sports.
Part of improving the citizens’ health was enforcing standardization and regulation of the
medical field. The Nationalist government enacted strident legal reforms to control old-style
jieshengpo and to support trained zhuchanshi. The goal of these reforms was to legitimize
modern midwifery by creating distinctions between old-style and new-style midwives. They
attacked and vilified the jieshengpo on several fronts: these women were unsanitary,
superstitious, dangerous, backward, and uncontrollable, all characteristics that the Nationalist
government attempted to thwart as further evidenced by later anti-superstition campaigns and the
New Life Movement. Furthermore, modern midwives were sanitary, scientific, safe, modern,
284 Ibid., 178.
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