Modern Girl, New Woman: Female Adolescence among the Overseas Chinese of British Malaya and Singapore, 1900s–50s

This paper explores the ways in which Chinese traditional notions about childhood and adolescence converged (and conflicted) with newly introduced concepts of puberty and womanhood in the realm of female education, situated at the cultural crossroads of a European colony in early twentieth century Southeast Asia. A close look at the evolution of rules, curricula and writings in Chinese-language girls' schools in British Malaya and Singapore reveals how assumptions about the physical, emotional and sexual development of female Chinese youth were transmitted and translated from an ancestral homeland into a diasporic milieu, and how forces of modernization impinged on these conceptions of Chinese girlhood and womanhood, in colony and nation. At the turn of the twentieth century in British Malaya and Singapore, French and Irish Catholic missionaries, British Protestant and American Methodist missionaries, the colonial government, and members of the large ethnic Chinese community who had settled in these colonies established a multitude of girls' schools. While primary education was co-educational for children aged six through twelve, secondary education was segregated by sex – girls' schools were intended for students from ages twelve through seventeen. These years were regarded as crucial for instilling values, skills and cultural orientations that would lead girls towards specific kinds of womanhood and gender roles that were prioritized by each cultural-educational institution. While English-language schools have typically been credited with introducing more “modern” ideas of the female role in society, it was in fact Chinese-language girls' schools, with their development of non-gender specific curricula, radical notions of equality, and advancement of nationalist political consciousness among Chinese females exploring a space of relative autonomy between the dependency of childhood and the obligations of adulthood, that seem to have brought about greater change in gender roles and attitudes among the diasporic Chinese community.