Rare Flowers, Modern Girls, Good Citizens

Chinese-language girls’ schools in British Malaya and Singapore grew out of the national modernization movement in late Qing and early Republican China, and therefore also contained the contradictions of the “woman question” of that period. These schools were sites of modernization and politicization for overseas Chinese women, introducing non-gender-specific curricula, notions of gender equality, and ideals of national citizenship. Arguably, they may have done more to usher in modernity for girls and women than contemporaneous English schools in Malaya and Singapore, challenging the received wisdom that modernizing change was a Western-driven movement. At the same time, these schools sometimes perpetuated traditional gender role expectations even more energetically than occurred in China, because those beliefs were associated with the cultural heritage that they were supposed to uphold, especially in a Western imperial milieu. Chinese political and social modernization hence became associated with cultural conservatism.