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

and hat. She has the images and documents to back up her stories about fetal development,
childbirth, and child-care. On the other hand, the modern midwives were, for the most part,
young, unmarried, and childless. What could they possibly know about birth? It is no wonder
that some women, especially in rural areas, did not readily accept modern midwives.
Furthermore, these images are, frankly, frightening, perhaps even moreso to the majority of
Chinese women who had not been desensitized, as we have today, through physiology and
dissection classes in school.
As we have seen in Chapter Two, by the Nationalist era, education for women was still
not widespread. For those women who did attend school, biology and physiology were not
standard subjects of study. In fact, most students – male or female – would not have received
education in these subjects unless they were attending preparatory courses to enter medical
school. 554 Diagrams like these were found primarily in medical school textbooks like Essentials
of Obstetrics and Childbirth and Nursing (See Figures 5.4 and 5.5). 555 Such images are absent
from the pamphlets, journals, and handbooks geared to the layperson, and remain absent from
general knowledge even during the CCP era of barefoot doctors. The images here are arrayed in
a controlled fashion – because we all know childbirth is anything but controllable – illustrating
that science has won over the human body. 556 Science has taken over the baby-making
machinery, and here is its proof: we have captured the images for all to see.
554 Hsu, Ou Yang, and Lew, "Education of Women in China," Schneider, Biology and Revolution.
555 Lu and Mai, Shengchan Yu Yuying (Childbirth and Nursing), Su, Taichan Xuzhi (Essentials of Obstetrics).
556 Judith Farquhar, “For Your Reading Pleasure: Self-Health (Ziwo Baojian) Information in 1990s Beijing,”
Positions 9, no. 1 (2001): 105-30.
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