Female Students With Modern Education In China - 1900-1930 Years

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze and study the development of higher education for women from 1900 to 1930. It take female college students as the object of study. In the thesis, the students' life in different educational and cultural context, the social meaning of their roles of gender and identification is described. Meanwhile, the development of higher education for women in the complicated social and historical changes in China is discussed and studied. The complicated relationship between education, culture, society and the living conditions of the female college students has been analyzed as well.The theory of social gender and the way of observation is an important angle of view and theoretical foundation of the thesis. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Chinese society changed greatly, when gender recognition became a problem in the construction of a new nation. During that time, both the nation and the social class of intellectuals were reconstructing and re-explaining the role of gender and the principle of value. Higher education for women came into birth and developed just in such situation. As for female college students, they were also facing the problem of reconstructing their identification when the old value and ideological system collapsed. The change began under the influence of people's awareness of educational, cultural and social rights. The thesis starts from this point to study higher education for women and the living conditions of female college students at the beginning of the 20th century. It aims to make people understand the modernity and woman education in China at that time so as to learn more about the history of Chinese education.Narrative inquiry is a method, which the author use in the thesis. Schools are good educational places where concentrated, efficient subjects are well-organized and well-designed to influence students. However, it is usually a difficult problem for the traditional logical analysis and narration to reproduce people's feelings, psychological activities and the social influence in their mind. The thesis, by analyzing theories and literature, tries to probe further into the historical spot through people's education experience so as to reveal the historical reality which has been filtered or forgotten.The thesis is divided into the following parts:The part of introduction explains the purpose and significance of the study,problems and solutions, structure of the thesis and the train of thought, method, angle of view and the period of time.Chapter one is about women and Chinese modernity. This chapter mainly discusses how women were accepted by the class of intellectuals, and became a part of the discourse, and what the relationship between women, education for women and Chinese modernity in the process of China's pursuit of modernization from the end of the 19th century to the May 4th Movement. It was in that background that high education for women developed. However, the study of location of the female college students, their family background and personality, and their educational experiences shows how much influence the education for women by the traditional Chinese gentry lay on modern education, it also reveals the relationship between education for women and nationalism.Chapter two is about culture, gender and woman students of the missionary woman colleges. The missionary woman colleges, in a sense, had a special cultural and educational environment, which was away from the cultural value, tradition and customs of Chinese society. This chapter begins from the teachers' role of gender and identification, and studies the special school education and cultural atmosphere, from which we can learn how the special cultural connotation and teachers' contradictory role of gender represented in the educational purposes and contents, and how it influenced the students behavior. Furthermore, the woman students' subjective awareness and their persistence of independence made them pursuit for the new style of life which was different fr...