A Little Education, a Little Emancipation

From the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, British colonial policies toward Chinese female students in Malaya and Singapore were driven more by political than social considerations. An early period of inattention to female education by the British created spaces for missionary societies and the local Chinese community to establish linguistically plural, private girls’ schools. The colonial administration increasingly intervened in female education several decades after these schools had been founded, with different agendas depending on each institution’s language of instruction: in English schools, to bring the curriculum in line with racialized notions of femininity, and in Chinese schools, to fight the perceived threat of rising Chinese nationalism. Governmental concerns over managing the ethnic Chinese population outweighed the gender-specific assumptions that characterized educational policies for female students of other ethnicities.