The Modern Woman and the household: hygiene, urban education and the YWCA in Hong Kong, 1921–41

Abstract

This article examines the cultural figure of the Modern Chinese Woman as produced by the colonial educational scene and the women’s club of the Hong Kong Young Women’s Christian Association (HKYWCA) in inter-war Hong Kong. In the broader context, where city-wide sanitary reform rested on changing daily hygiene practices and everyday routines in middle- and working-class Chinese households, equipping Chinese women with knowledge of domestic hygiene became a matter of state and public concern. The figure of the Modern Chinese Woman, this article shows, proliferated in inter-war Hong Kong in the context of modernizing domestic and urban spaces by Western-trained medical and sanitary experts. This in turn captured the specific sites and spaces where modern practices of health and hygiene took shape, and the modern femininity that drove and emerged through them.