Good Wife, Wise Mother

"Drawing on Japanese and Chinese newspapers, textbooks, oral interviews, and fiction, Fang Yu Hu illustrates how a seemingly progressive project advanced a particular Japanese vision of modernity, womanhood, and citizenship, to which the colonized Han Taiwanese people responded with varying degrees of collaboration, resistance, adaptation, and adoption. Hu also assesses the program's long-term impact on Taiwan's class structure, notions of childhood and adulthood, and political identity both during and after the end of Japanese occupation in 1945. Good Wife, Wise Mother expands the study of Taiwanese history by contributing important gendered and non-elite perspectives. It will be of interest to any historian concerned with questions of modernity, hybridity, and colonial nostalgia"--