Prior to the NYCEP, Taiwan’s women had experienced generations of
institutionalised discrimination in education. Traditional Confucian society made no place for women outside of the home and the functional aspect of education as
preparation for students to take up roles in society made this style of education largely irrelevant for girls. Even when ideas of gender equity began to proliferate in the late 19th Century, they were not put into widespread practice and female education in this period depended on individual families choosing to educate their girls for reasons of their own. Social circumstances and the implications of Confucian education itself meant that those families had profound economic incentives to focus maximum effort on providing for their sons’ educations instead. In addition, the Qing state had no concept at all of mass education all until comparatively late and the inclusion of girls into that scheme was a step too far for the bankrupt Qing state.
The Japanese era opened some new opportunities for women, both in education and the workplace, but it did not make a substantial difference to the inferior social status of women in a Taiwanese society still dominated by Rostov’s ‘traditional’ features.
While the colonial government did recognise Taiwanese women as key parts of its
‘model colony’, it explicitly did not accord them fully-equal status, actively discriminating against them in terms of the number and quality of opportunities opened to them, as well as the quality of the education they were to receive. Women were expected to be second-class citizens whose primary role was that of home-maker and although women were admitted to mandatory elementary education during this period it was deliberately enshrined in colonial law that this was not to be on equal
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terms to their male counterparts, since the education girls were to receive was never intended to be of the same standard as that of boys.
The Nationalist government at first made no changes to the structure of education on Taiwan and kept the system bequeathed them by the departing Japanese, making changes only to the curriculum to satisfy their desire to undo the effects of Japan’s assimilation policy and replace it with one of their own. Although the early influence of the women’s rights movement during the ‘Nanking Decade’ remained strong, the economic situation remained weak and girls’ education had to wait until the resources were available to the state to fund it.
There are no examples of women teachers in Imperial-era Taiwan. As noted above, the Confucian education system existed to prepare students for the Imperial Exams and subsequent public life, from both of which women were wholly excluded. Only after Taiwan was surrendered to the Japanese Empire did the Qing government begin the first steps toward a formal education system which included girls, and it was left to their Nationalist successors to create an education system which incorporated female equity in education as a matter of course. All of these efforts, however, took place in the period before the government of the Republic of China took control of Taiwan.
Taiwan’s post WWII Nationalist rulers acknowledged the need to educate the island’s labour force in order to support their ambitious plans for economic development and nation-building in the same way that the Japanese had several decades earlier.
However, with greater concerns still demanding their attention on the Chinese Mainland, Taiwan received little of their attention and few substantive changes were made to the provision or structure of education beyond changing the syllabus to
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reflect the nation-building agenda. Women teachers did, however, play a role in their future plans for the island and these plans took on a greater urgency after the regime was forced to flee the Mainland and was left with Taiwan as the main territory still under its control. The teacher training system developed in this period was a general purpose one designed to produce co-educational teachers for co-educational schools in a co-educational environment. However, the combination of gender-blind entrance exams, free tuition, attractive employment terms and a social bias towards elite schools meant that academically-gifted girls were at an advantage when competing for entry to Normal Schools and Colleges because their male counterparts were filtered into other institutions as a result of the social expectations on them. As a result, the gender ratio of trained teachers entering the profession began to tilt in favour of women from the late 1970s onward.
In contrast to the purposefully-discriminatory Japanese measures, the reforms of the education system implemented under the Republic of China were deliberately gender-blind in that, while no measure was introduced to specifically promote women’s education, the provisions covered all children equally regardless of gender. Despite there being ample opportunity to exclude girls or even merely ignore their absence from schooling they were officially supposed to receive, the Republic expended considerable administrative effort to ensure that they were present, received the same education as their male peers and competed for access to the selective levels of the public education system on the closest thing to a level playing-field Taiwanese women had experienced in recorded history.
The entrance examination system also afforded those girls who were qualified an opportunity to compete with their male peers on a more or less equal basis and while this was not a provision of the 1968 reform, it did assist those who benefitted from the
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NYCEP in furthering their education in institutions they may not previously have considered applying for as a result of gender stereotyping. The rise recorded in female access to SHS which occurred as soon as the reform took effect is the most immediate indicator of how girls’ educational opportunities were altered by this combination of increased qualification level and gender-blind selection. The number of girls in SHS each year doubled in 10 years from 126,000 to 307,000, with the rate of increase remaining constant for over a decade and the number of girls exceeding that of boys from 1981 until 1996. Not only was JHS producing qualified girls in unprecedented numbers but the wider education system was both willing and able to absorb them into even higher levels.
The NYCEP was a prime example of the attitude to gender equity which had
permeated the Republic from its founding and remained a part of its ideological DNA even when social conservatism blocked actual progress. The reform opened women’s opportunities in ways far beyond those enshrined in the text itself, with knock-on effects to their position in society beyond the traditional settings of home and family.
Most tellingly, the unprecedented ease with which Taiwanese women could enter the previously-inaccessible male bastion of teaching after the NYCEP took effect demonstrates the remarkable change in social attitudes which had accompanied mass female education and the willingness of a government to impose changes which ran contrary to the existing norms of Taiwanese society.
The proportion of women in the teaching profession surged at all levels and although there remained some inequalities in career progression within each level they were in general well-represented at all levels of the national education system. By 1984, women comprised more than half of all teachers in Taiwan; by 1989, 21 years after the reform and a single generation later, women teachers comprised a majority at
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every level except tertiary where they comprised 31 compared with less than 8% in 1950. The explosion of female entry to the teaching profession after 1971 was due to a combination of increased opportunity created by demand for teachers; and increased capability created by better access to appropriate levels of education. The NYCEP was not the sole factor in creating this combination but it was the major factor in both creating the demand and putting women in a position to satisfy it.
In weakening the hold that structural social inequality held on women’s prospects by imposing and enforcing mandatory education; and in rationing access to education through gender-blind entrance exams, the Republic of China government managed to strike a blow for women’s rights with the NYCEP despite the lack of a specific gender-equity agenda in the reform itself. The active role that the government took in enforcing female participation in mandatory education is evidence that
better-educated girls were not a wholly-unintended side-effect of the reform but an intrinsic part of it.
The changes wrought to women’s employment by the process of economic
development under the Japanese and Nationalist governments initially brought little change to the status of women as they were still mainly labouring as part of a family unit and had little control over their lives or independence from the family structure.
There were, however, incremental changes brought about by the normalisation of women workers and once the momentum was gained in one ‘status position’ it became less unthinkable for it to change in others.
The fundamental changes to women’s status can be assessed using Hollingshead’s model, whereby social status is a composite of education, occupation, sex, and marital status. Of the four, only gender can be assumed static and independent of the effects
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of the NYCEP. The impact of improved education on marital status is complex, since a better-educated bride is a more attractive match for a well-educated male but at the same time higher levels of education correlate to delayed marriage age and higher rates of non-marriage amongst women (Chang & Li, 2011). Indeed, data from the National Statistics Bureau’s ‘Women's Marriage, Fertility and Employment Survey’
(National Statistical Bureau, 2014) shows that the average age at which women first get married has increased for each level of highest educational qualification; and furthermore that the difference in marriage ages between one level of qualification and the next has increased substantially. For example, in 1980, girls whose highest qualification was JHS married on average at 21.47 years; for SHS, it was 22.68; for Bachelor Degree graduates it was 25.01; and the difference in marriage ages from JHS to Bachelor’s was 3.54 years. By 1985, the figures were 21.34, 23.15, 25.52 and 4.18 respectively. However, Chang and Li’s findings indicate that while the
proportion of Taiwanese women who remained unmarried “more than doubled” from the 1950-59 birth cohort to the 1960-69 one, the change was from around 1 in 20 to around 2 in 20 (Chang & Li, 2011, p. 10). For the purposes of comparing the social status of women before and after the 1968 education reform, this difference can be assumed to be negligible and the rate of marriage constant across these cohorts.
Thus, the greatest determinants of social status when applying Hollingshead’s model to Taiwan’s women in the aftermath of the NYCEP are the two variables ‘years of schooling completed’ and the ‘occupational group’ to which their profession belongs.
Since the scores assigned to both these categories would increase as a result of women entering the teaching profession as a result of receiving adequate schooling, the changes wrought by the NYCEP have clearly had considerable impact on their overall status.
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The aim of this thesis was to determine the extent to which the NYCEP opened new opportunities to Taiwanese women using rates of participation in education both as students and teachers as proxy measures for women’s social status. The teaching profession was chosen as one which held high status throughout the period but which had traditionally been male-dominated. Female employment in this period also showed profound inequalities, and even when modernisation was begun under Japanese rule, remained limited to home-making and farm labouring as part of a family unit, with few roles consisting of paid employment and almost none allowing any autonomy by the girls themselves.
The Taiwanese society onto which this colonial policy of gender discrimination was grafted was eager to take advantage of the new earning power of its girls that
industrial development provided but it did not fundamentally change its view of their role, seeing these opportunities instead as merely an extension of the traditional female role of providing for the family. Taiwanese girls remained under close family supervision and their earnings went directly into the family coffers; few were able to live an independent life despite their new-found earning power.
The NYCEP wrought considerable changes on Taiwanese society’s perceptions of women and women’s roles. It allowed any girl with the ability to gain the ‘critical mass’ of education which granted them entry to previously-closed professions and while it did not grant Taiwan’s females complete educational equity in terms of the Dakar Framework, it pushed the inequity back to the highest levels of the education system. It was not, however, a policy success in isolation and had it been attempted earlier would likely have had poorer results from the female perspective. It took a society accustomed to women working outside the home and willing to accept the next step; financial incentives to educating girls in a new economic model; and the
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ability of women to control their own fertility through effective contraception before opportunity could be translated into outcome.
This study has been limited by the need to simplify an essentially complex series of human choices into social trends. The exact nature of the effect of societal conditions on social mores has been assumed to be a simplistic cause/effect relationship and cannot hope to capture either individual choices or ‘virtuous cycle’ effects of social status on participation rates. It is possible that the greater acceptance of women into the teaching profession after 1968 was both a result of the improved social status of women in general and a cause of it, with barriers to entry falling as a result of the normalisation of women in high-status roles.
It is recommended that this question be resolved through comparative study of the social prestige of women teachers in the eras before and after the 1968 NYCEP took effect, using the Hollingshead model and a statistically-significant number of subjects.
By tracing the education and employment records of a sample of Taiwan’s
Elementary and Secondary School teachers who qualified in the decade before the 1968 reform; and comparing their social status with a similar cohort who entered the teaching profession in the decade after 1974, a quantitative basis could be produced for determining the change in the social status of Taiwan’s women which resulted from the NYCEP.
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