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

the health of the fetus. If she bore a female child, or one with a disability, it was because she did
not follow the taijiao restrictions and/or she had performed a bad deed or had had licentious or
evil thoughts.
In her study of hygiene education and physical education, Sarah Stevens explains that
Chinese modernizers justified schooling women in methods of taijiao for the sake of the nation.
In a 1923 article on women’s physical culture, Xie Siyan proffered that women “bear a great
responsibility for childbirth and must understand proper reproductive health” and they must
improve their “hygienic habits [in order to] ensure that their future children have a proper role
model.” 536 Stevens focuses on the paternalistic and subordinating language in these articles that
utilized women as “public wombs” to improve the race-nation. 537 I am interested here not in the
subjugation of women, but how taijiao developed from traditional beliefs – denounced by
modernizers as superstitious – into a modern ideology based on scientific principles, in much the
same way that the new zhuchanshi displaced the old-style midwives. For during the Republican
era, a new and modern taijiao emerged distinct from the superstitious taijiao of the past. In this
new taijiao, the fetus was still impressionable, but the effects were explained in medical and
scientific terms. Traditional Chinese beliefs were justified by science.
For example, in an article on taijiao and hygiene during pregnancy, Yun Qin, along with
her discussion on avoiding sex, spicy food, and hard work during pregnancy, also talks about the
importance of environment on the fetus. Yun states that it is “very important for pregnant
women to be careful to maintain an emotional balance, no matter the time or place, in order to
536 Xie Siyan, "The Question of Women's Physical Culture (Nuzi Tiyu Wenti)." Ladies' Journal (Funu Zazhi) 9, no. 7
(1923): 2-5, as cited in Sarah E. Stevens, "Making Female Sexuality in Republican China: Women's Bodies in the
Discourses of Hygiene, Education, and Literature" (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2001), 89.
537 Also see Stevens, "Making Female Sexuality in Republican China,” especially Chapter Two, pp. 70-75, “Fetal
Education and the Public Womb.”
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