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

CHAPTER FIVE. THE MOTHER AND THE MODERN: MATERNAL AND CHILD
HEALTH IN REPUBLICAN PRINT MEDIA
Beginning in the early 1900s with the rapid rise of the popular press, maternal and child health
became a common topic in women’s and family magazines and public health publications. At
the same time, issues of science and modernization were at the forefront of political and social
conversations about China’s future. This chapter explores ideas of modernization gleaned from
the new print media with regard to pre- and postnatal care, childbirth, and the postpartum period.
The pamphlets, handbooks, and articles on scientific reproduction shed light on these changing
ideologies about maternal and child health and the role as social reproducers that the Chinese
government and modernizers asked women to assume. This work shows how modernization
discourse in the Chinese popular press of early twentieth-century China called upon women to
utilize scientific prenatal care (taijiao) in order to have healthy babies. Furthermore, the
literature on taijiao and child-care is part of a larger discourse on scientific modernization of
childbirth. In this regard, I discuss modern midwifery techniques and training curricula, the
public image of midwifery programs, and an analysis of the appeal of science and its relation to
nation building.
There was no unified or regulated movement to promote maternal and child health in
Republican China. Several different groups of people contributed to this movement:
Westerners – medical personnel, social scientists, and religious evangelists – as well as
nationalist Chinese modernizers and government officials, some of whom were trained in
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