A Nation In Utero: Pregnancy and Fetal Education in Early Republican China, 1912-1937.

摘要

At the turn of the twentieth century, several prominent Chinese intellectuals advocated a return to the ancient practice of fetal education to save the nation by strengthening the Chinese race in utero. Fetal education instructed pregnant women to discipline their emotions, behavior, and environment to nurture the physical and moral development of the impressionable fetus. In the midst of early Republican debates over the role of women in China's modernizing project, Chinese writers promoted, reformulated, or denounced fetal education as a way to strengthen the nation, selectively appropriating examples from Chinese, Japanese, and Western culture to bolster their arguments. As these writers reconciled new concepts from Western biomedicine with pre-existing Chinese ideas about pregnancy and reproduction, their choices influenced how they understood the female reproductive body and the relationship between the mother, the fetus, and the external environment. By situating these discussions in the broader context of Chinese debates over science, culture, gender, and the nation, this dissertation ultimately reveals the centrality of gender and the female body to Chinese modernity.;The first two chapters of the dissertation argue that an earlier generation of modern syncretists such as Song Jiazhao played a pivotal role in translating and popularizing science, biomedicine, and eugenics in the nineteen teens, representing a robust synthesis of tradition, nationalism, and modernity that continued to thrive in the aftermath of the iconoclastic May Fourth generation. The third chapter reveals the contradictions in the efforts of May Fourth intellectual Huang Shi to liberate women from Confucianism and superstition by denouncing their reproductive customs. The fourth chapter shows how eugenicist Pan Guangdan argued that genetics alone---not environmental influences---determined an individual's strength, intelligence, and moral character. The final chapter of the dissertation analyzes a popular pregnancy guide to show the emergence of a new consensus on reproductive advice, in which a modernized form of fetal education existed alongside eugenic and biomedical understandings of pregnancy. Finally, this dissertation argues that the combination of eugenics, nationalism, and biomedicine paved the way for increasing state interference in women's reproductive lives.