Meng Mu Meets the Modern: Female Exemplars in Early-Twentieth-Century Textbooks for Girls and Women

孟母遇見現代：二十世紀初女子教科書中的女性典範

10.6352/mhwomen.200008.0129

季家珍(Joan Judge)

教科書 ； 典範女性 ； 近代西方女性典範 ； textbooks ； exemplary women ； modern western exemplars

近代中國婦女史研究

8期（2000 / 08 / 01）

129 - 177

英文

自一世紀至二十世紀早期，中國女訓書籍不僅是向女子傳播專門知識的工具，這類書籍表述著社會觀念，孕育了值逾古今的道德規範和衍易變化的文化重點。儘管這些教本的形式與內容歷經了幾多世紀的變遷，其功用基本未變。女訓教本不以促進女子學識爲目的，不以培養女子才能爲任務，而是爲了向女子灌輸實用的行爲倫理規範。在二十世紀早期，當中西接觸激發中國人對其歷史久遠的文化自負重新評估的時候，人們對傳統女訓文本提出質疑，進行補充，並在一定程度內奉行遵守。 本文以二十世紀初女子教科書中的女性典範爲中心，探討女訓文本的傳統。這些女性典範既包括從一世紀以來女訓文本中的歷史人物，亦包括近代西方婦女。這些榜樣人物在晚清資料中的作用打破了簡單的傳統對現代的二分模式。新式教本對歷史人物的採用可視爲一種文化的歷史沉積。在此沉積中，二十世紀早期的教本代表了千百年來女傳敘述的再調整與重構建過程中的一個階段。同時，並不能簡單地將晚清教本對西方女性典範的採用理解爲與過去傳統的決裂。這類教本將西方現代人物與古時中國傳統女性典範相穿插，標誌著現有文化傳統的內在轉變的可能，表明了新概念如何常常以古訓來建構。

From the first through the early-twentieth centuries, Chinese female instruction books were more than simply a means of transmitting specific kinds of knowledge to girls and women. They also imparted a vision of the social world, serving as a matrix of both timeless ethical norms and shifting cultural priorities. Despite changes in the form and content of these texts over the centuries, their function was fundamentally the same. It was not to promote high intellectual learning (xue 學) among women, or to cultivate feminine aesthetic talent (cal 才), but to inculcate practical principles of ethical womanly conduct (jiao 教). In the early twentieth century as China's encounter with Western nations provoked a reevaluation of its long-standing cultural assumptions, the textual tradition devoted to promoting this feminine jiao was questioned, supplemented, and, to a certain degree, upheld. This article examines the tradition of female didactic texts, focusing in particular on the use of feminine exemplars in early-twentieth-century textbooks for girls and women. Both historical Chinese women celebrated in didactic texts from the first century and Western heroines from the more recent past were featured in these texts. The ways these exemplars functioned in the late-Qing materials challenges any simplistic formulation of a tradition/modernity divide. The use of historical exemplars in the new-style textbooks can be most productively analyzed in terms of the sedimentation of meaning over time with the early-twentieth-century texts representing one stage in the continued reappropriation and reconfiguration of female biographical narratives through the centuries. At the same time, the inclusion of foreign feminine models in the late Qing textbooks cannot simply be understood as a radical rupture with the past. The insertion of these modern Western lives into the ancient but constantly evolving repertoire of exemplary Chinese women both marked the possibility of transformation from within existing cultural traditions and demonstrated how the heralded ”new” often remained structured by age-old precepts.

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