Guardians of Family Health in Qing China

Abstract

This article examines women’s role as the guardian of family health during the Qing period to uncover a neglected aspect of their transformation into the New Woman of the early twentieth century. Although medicine as a form of specialized knowledge has seldom been related to the tradition of women’s learning, my case studies suggest that gentry women during the Qing period routinely resorted to medical texts to regulate family health. This aspect of women’s learning readily lent itself to the project of national strengthening under new exigencies: as China’s encounter with imperialism during the late Qing period came to include a discourse of hygiene, gentry wives could take a step further to reform the national body and claim their centrality to China’s transformation into a modern nation.