Abstract:

In Republican China, construction of human body was a vehicle of displacing and displaying social anxieties, and the Chinese body encountered intensive and continuous configuration (Huang jinlin, 2006, P.3). Schools in Republican China, as an enclosed space, organized along with Republican China, are of importance to regulate bodies. Human body gives a privileged access to the research of history of education in Republican China. In this paper, we will examine the conflicts and struggles between school authorities and girls around “girls’ hair”, which occurred in the early Republican China. Republican China experienced a series of conflicts and struggles around girls’ hair in school. It is interesting to find a more traditional view on girls’ hair cutting or hair perm prevailed, while forbidding feet binding and liberating breast were seen as a rebellion against body repression. Based on literature review, we analyze the possible reasons behind it. In the early 20th century, inspired by national liberation movement, as well as democratic revolution movement and international feminist movement, women’s self consciousness in China was awakened. Women’s pursuit of liberation evoked the anxiety of men, who, for a long time, monitored the discourse on what image of women should be. The right of self determination of hair was considered as a protest against male domination, hence the conflicts and struggles between girls and schools. That girls’ hair cutting or hair perm was not an endowed symbol of modernity was another reason. In Republican China, women were imbued with “nationalist universality in a masculinist discourse” (Tani Barlow, 1996, pp. 58). While girls’ hair cutting or hair perm even in modern western countries met with opposition, the image of modern women which the progressive intellectual class (overwhelmingly male) constructed, who put all modern western experiences as reference, did not involve hair cutting or hair perm. Furthermore, in the article Figuring Modernity: The New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China, Sarahe Stevens proposed that there were two images of woman in Republican China, the figure of the New Woman and the figure of Modern Girl, and these two images reflected opposite views of modernity, the former stood for the nation and its quest for modernity and the latter was described as the expression of modernity visually, represented fears for the modern nation and the drawback of modernity. This paper explores the factors which contributed to the construction of girls’ hair in school in Republican China, that is, the issue of modernity and nation, the pursuit of women’s liberation and being fashionable.

Key words: schools in Republican China, girl students, haircutting, construction of human body