Scientific Reproduction under the Public Gaze: Reconfiguring Women's Bodies and Health in China and Japan, 1920-1940s

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

After WWI, discourses over the issues of population and scientific medicine flourished in East Asian societies. While existing scholarship has examined these debates predominantly within intellectual communities, little is known about in what ways such powerful new knowledge regarding reproduction, birth control, and public health affect wider social groups, particularly working-class women in post-World War I China and Japan. This panel brings to light the activism of the gendered public influenced by complex ideas of science, medicine, and politics. Specifically from the perspectives of women's bodies and gendered individual experiences with medicine, this panel shows how different social groups perceived and approached reproduction. While Lee and David's papers highlight eugenic conceptions appropriated in reconstructing female bodies, Ma and Li underscore women's reproductive practices. In the case of interwar Japan, Lee dissects the ways in which reformers rationalized eugenic rhetoric to reconstruct proletarian women's bodies for socialist revolutionary goals. David's study on birth control activism in the work of Dr. Yang Chongrui shows paralleling efforts in Republican China to promote eugenic birth control awareness and protect female bodies. Focusing on the lower-class women in Republican Shanghai, Ma examines such unprivileged social groups' choices of abortive methods when folk remedy encountered western-style medicine. Such encounters were further explored in wartime nursing work with mothers and children in Li's work. Collectively, this set of papers brings the intersection of class, gender, knowledge, and practice to the forefront in rethinking women's agency, as well as social history of medicine and the body.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizers

• Shenglan Li, Binghamton University

• Mirela Violeta David, University of Saskatchewan

Chair

• Tina Phillips Johnson, Saint Vincent College

Individual Presentations

• Revolution and Eugenics: The Genealogy of the Japanese Proletarian Movement for Birth Control (1922-1933) - Sujin Lee, Cornell University

• Birth Control, Midwifery and Eugenics in the Work of Dr. Yang Chongrui - Mirela Violeta David, University of Saskatchewan

• Backyard Gardens in the Metropolis: Folk Abortions in Republican Shanghai - Ling Ma, University at Buffalo

• "Like the Native Trumpeter on a Tiger Hunt": Nurses, Maternity, and Child Health in Wartime China, 1930-1945 - Shenglan Li, Binghamton University

Discussant

• Jia-Chen Fu, Emory University