前行与复归:晚清女学生的形塑

Progressivism and Conservatism:The Shaping of Female Students in the Late Qing Dynasty

晚清女性因承载国人对现代民族国家的想象而走出闺阁、走入学堂。教育经历、学习体验、同学情谊等将她们联结起来,形成了一个新的性别群体——女学生。在对女学生的形塑中,学校从入学资格、教育目标、学生管理、服饰仪容、道德行为等方面对其予以多方规训;女学生则因自我意识的觉醒,在人生目标、知识学习、性别意识、社会行动等方面进行了自我塑造。保守与趋新相互裹挟的变革张力中,女学生呈现出多重面相——她们既是国族建设的基石,又是男性欲望的对象;既是学生装的仕女,又是摩登的时装女郎;既是朋辈的偶像,又是社会的异类。前行与复归的纠葛,不仅映射了晚清女子教育发展的复杂面向,而且投射出中国现代化的暧昧与矛盾。

In the late Qing Dynasty, women walked out of the boudoir and into the school because of carrying Chinese people’s imagination of the modern nation-state. Educational goals, learning experience, same-sex friendship and so on had connected them, forming a new gender group —— female students. In the shaping of female students, the school gave them various disciplines such as admission qualification, educational goal, student management, dress and appearance, and moral behavior. Female students, on the other hand, because of their budding self-consciousness,shaped themselves into heroes and heroines in such aspects as life goal, knowledge learning, gender consciousness and social action. In the revolution between conservatism and modernity, female students presented multiple aspects.They were both the base of the social transformation and the object of desire, both ladies in a school dress and fashionable dress girls, both idols and outliers. The entanglement of progressivism and conservatism reflected the complexity of the development of women’s education in the late Qing dynasty, and was the mirror image of the ambiguity and contradiction in the connotation of Chinese modernity.