Introduction

In June 1916, an editorial entitled "What Will Be Our Duties as Women over the Next Fifty Years?" appeared in Funü zazhi (The Ladies' Journal), China's longest-running women's magazine in the first half of the twentieth century.¹ The author, Hu Binxia, the only woman editor in the magazine's sixteen years of publication, claimed that women were not qualified to participate in political or educational reform measures.² Echoing nineteenth-century Western missionaries, whose proselytizing efforts were aimed at women as a conduit for conversion, Hu argued that only family reform should be entrusted to women, since that would surely lead to social change. The focus of Hu's reform was domestic sanitation. She arrived at her suggestion through lengthy argument and convoluted logic, combining women's education, nationalism, and her sketchy understanding of women's rights in the West. According to her, the status of women was higher in places with cleaner households, which in turn strengthened such countries as England, the United States, and Japan. Hence, Chinese women were exhorted to maintain clean households in order to elevate China's international status.³ Apparently, for the salvation of the nation, Chinese women were to transform themselves into a generation of cleaning ladies.

To be sure, the concern over household cleanliness was not a new concept in China. As early as the mid-seventeenth century, the renowned playwright and vernacular fiction writer Li Yu made a case for household cleanliness. But, as Francesca Bray speculates in Technology and Gender , Li Yu's insistence on maintaining clean households reflects a symbolic view of dust as polluting, as expressed in both Confucian and Buddhist thought.⁴ Viewing Hu Binxia's exhortation 250 years later, we see that the indigenous idea escaped her attention, and that she equated the role of a clean house with national deliverance.⁵ The culmination of these sentiments revealed the untapped potential of women in the case of nationalist survival and a rather naive belief in the power of the Western-informed notion of hygiene.

For Chinese intellectuals during the first half of the twentieth century, military defeats at the hands of European countries and Japan engendered an urgent need for national rejuvenation, which was manifested in two related issues, health and wealth. The most famous among these reformers, of...