Industrious Women and Lost Traditions: Gender, Imperial Exchange, and Handicrafts Education in British Malaya and the American Philippines, 1900–1940

This article explores the ways that British administrators adopted and altered educational models for handicrafts training from the American Philippines and applied them to vernacular schools in rural Malaya from 1916 to 1931. Rural Malays were taught to modernize and develop within their traditional gender roles and economic stations, and not to theoretically westernize, modernize, and prepare for self-rule as students were in the Philippines. British educators and ethnologists saw handicrafts education as a way to revitalize Malay culture and improve rural Malays' economic selfsufficiency. These policies were intended to mitigate Malays' desires for social mobility, and reinforce the traditional systems of power utilized by the British to maintain indirect rule over the colony. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how education policies, imperial ideas of modernization, and conceptions of indigenous culture were shaped by the trans-imperial exchange of ideas and the local circumstances in which they were implemented.