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

outside the home in nation-building efforts. Furthermore, most women who went into public
health or medical service did not marry, or stopped working once they did marry. As in the
United States and Europe, married women in China did not normally pursue a profession. In fact,
one of the requirements of most medical training schools, including midwifery programs, was
that its students be single, and those who married while in training would be dismissed. The
most famous Western-trained Chinese women physicians, like Marion Yang, Ida Kahn, and
Mary Stone, never married, but dedicated their lives to serving others. It is beyond the scope of
this project to try to uncover how these women – unnatural in the Confucian sense of being
single and childless, yet revered because of their dedication to their nation – were viewed by
others in Chinese society. This is an area for further exploration. What we do know is that
sometimes reformers used the popular press to encourage women to fulfill roles other than those
of traditional wife and mother, in some cases by entering the medical field.
BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM IN THE REPUBLICAN PRESS
Scientific medicine created enormous social upheavals in early twentieth-century China. Many
famous modernizers like Chen Duxiu, Lu Xun, and Hu Shi heralded science as the savior of the
“sick man of Asia” and promised a linear progression towards modernity and its attendant
prosperity and health for all. 524 So dire was China’s state of health that one of its most famous
modernizers, Kang Youwei, envisioned a utopia in his treatise Datong shu (One World),
completed in 1898. In this work on ending world suffering, he dedicated a large part to relieving
the burdens of women. He called for limited contract marriages agreed upon by both parties, as
well as a “human roots institution” to care for expectant and parturient women and their infants.
524 D.W.Y. Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900-1950 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1965).
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