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

supported career woman. Several contemporaries disparaged women’s “modern” schooling,
asserting that if given Western-style education they would fail to fulfill their motherly and wifely
duties. At least some of these new midwives and other new professionals had to contend with
social ostracism for their choices. 477 What prompted women to enter the profession?
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
One of the goals of this history is to uncover the voices of the midwives and the women who
patronized them. Perhaps because physicians are perceived as more prestigious than midwives,
they have received the most attention from biographers. In addition, English language sources
for these women physicians are more readily available from the missions and Western
universities that sponsored them. Some historians have written in English about the earliest
Chinese female missionary physicians Kang Cheng (Ida Kahn康成 or甘介后) and Shi Meiyu
(Mary Stone 石美玉), 478 and there are a few biographies and reminiscences in Chinese on
obstetrician/gynecologist physicians from the 1930s and 1940s, like Marion Yang and Lin
Qiaozhi ( Kha-t’i Lim, 林巧稚). 479 The backgrounds of these women physicians were especially
auspicious. They were raised by missionaries or Christian families and were given every
opportunity for the best education.
The most well-known Western-trained Chinese physicians are Kang Cheng and Shi
Meiyu, two Chinese Christian women who were raised by missionaries and attended mission
schools in China. They both went on to study medicine at the University of Michigan and
477 Paul Bailey, "'Unharnessed Fillies': Discourse on the 'Modern' Female Student in Early Twentieth-Century
China," in Wu Sheng Zhi Sheng (Iii): Zhongguo De Funu Yu Wenhua 1600-1950 (Voices Amid Silence (Iii): Women
and the Culture in Modern China 1600-1950), ed. Lo Jiu-jung and Lu Miaw-fen (Taibei shi: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan
jindaishi yanjiusuo chuban, 2003): 327-57.
478 Shemo, "'An Army of Women.'"
479 Guo Jianyao, Lin Qiaozhi: Zhongguo Jiechu Fuchanke Nu Yisheng (Lin Qiaozhi: China's Outstanding Female
Obstetrician/Gynecologist) (Hong Kong: Xin ya wenhua shiye youxian gongsi, 1990).
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