“Guardians of family health: from the exemplary wife to the hygiene advocate”

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to illuminate a facet of the process of “becoming ‘new women’” among the guixiu (gentry women) of the eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century China, namely, women as guardians of family health. Through an examination of the genres of family letters and medical treatises employed by two women - the “exemplary wife” Chen Ershi (1785-1821), and the woman doctor and hygiene advocate Zeng Yi (1852-1927) - I argue that the late Qing hygiene drive, with its logic of building a strong national body by building healthy bodies of the Chinese people, in fact found one of its allies in the guixiu who took on themselves the duties of preventing illnesses and of caring for the sick in their households. The family letters of Chen Ershi demarcate a space apart from that represented by the poetry of women in that they reveal the everyday challenges that a gentry wife needed to face. Among them, guarding the health of the old and the young was pivotal. It was precisely from this wifely duty that Zeng Yi, herself also a guixiu, proceeded to prescribe remedies for the “illness” of the nation. Her treatises on medicine and hygiene signaled her participation in a male-dominated genre to address the crises of her time. What Chen looked up to as female exemplariness in fact carried over to Zeng’s redefinition of womanhood in a time of radical changes, and expanded into prescription after prescription for the “sick bodies” of China.