Keeping the Nation's House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China by Helen M. Schneider (review)

In 1940, China's Nationalist Ministry of Education issued a decree from its wartime capital of Chongqing. At a time when Japan occupied China's eastern seaboard and the Communists controlled the north, the Ministry called on educators and homemakers to "cultivate children's happiness." Doing more with less, teachers and mothers were supposed to make children believe that "even if the food is unsatisfactory, the clothes are inadequate, or the habitation is insufficient… it is still very good" (p. 1). In Keeping the Nation's House, Helen Schneider explores how Chinese educators and the Chinese state transformed the seemingly frivolous and individualistic bourgeois concept of domestic happiness into a political ideology that promised to save the Chinese nation. Schneider's methodically researched monograph charts the rise and fall (and rise again) of home economics in twentieth-century China, arguing that home economics became an academic discipline when it introduced new modern and political meanings into the Chinese home. Using women's magazines, educational debates, and home economics curricula as evidence, Schneider suggests that happy homes in Republican-era China were hygienic, healthful, efficient, and above all, the cornerstone of national salvation.

As Schneider notes, the idea that the household was central to political authority was nothing new in China. During the late imperial period, Neo-Confucian socio-political ideals connected household to state through an ideology of "inner" and "outer," in which the health of a household ("inner") helped determine the political stability of the state ("outer"), and vice versa. Recently, Susan Glosser (2003) has argued that family continued to be central to both Republican and early Communist political ideology. Schneider builds on Glosser's arguments about ideology by factoring in the materiality of home economics, explaining how educational practices transformed discursive ideas of a happy home into concrete plans to re-engineer Chinese society.

Through illuminating sources and captivating anecdotes, Schneider reveals the twists and turns that led Chinese people to focus on "keeping the nation's house," suggesting that the rise of domestic science as a force for national salvation was not a foregone conclusion. The story begins in the late Qing, when self-strengtheners called for educated women to take the lead in raising the next generation of Chinese citizens. In the wake of the Sino-Japanese War, these early reformers turned to Japanese models of female education, particularly the "good wife and wise mother." Educational reformers of the early Republic uniformly advocated for schools to educate girls and women outside the home, but they lacked consensus on what that education should look like, and on how female education could best reform Chinese society. Should education enhance women's natural talents, or tianzhi, as housekeepers, caretakers, and mothers? Or should women receive the same education as men, training them to enter society in a variety of careers?

In the 1920s and '30s, home economics educators forged a compromise by developing a curriculum that transformed the "natural" female talents of domestic nurturing and management into new public careers for women in education, nutrition, and health. "Keeping the nation's house" no longer simply meant asking women to modernize their own homes to serve the state, but instead meant calling upon women to pursue professional careers that could reform the nation's house at all levels of Chinese society. Infusing social reform into domesticity, home economics thus emerged as a formal academic discipline in the 1920s. Schneider suggests that this social turn in domestic education was due in part to an epistemological shift in female education away from Japan and toward the United States. The American Christian-founded Yenching University, for example, established the first long-running department of home economics in 1924, and like their colleagues in the social sciences, home economists at Yenching promoted social scientific education as a vehicle for enacting social change in China. But it took the crisis of...