Keeping the Nation's House

For many, the term home economics conjures images ofsterile classrooms where young girls and women learn to cook dinner andswaddle dolls, far removed from the seats of power.

Keeping the Nation's House unsettles this assumptionby revealing how elite Chinese women helped to build modern China onefamily at a time. Trained between the 1920s and the early 1950s, homeeconomists believed that their discipline would transform the mostfundamental of political spaces – the home – byteaching women to nurture ideal families and manage projects of socialreform. Although their discipline came undone after 1949, it created alegacy of gendered professionalism and reinforced the idea that leadersshould shape domestic rituals of the people.

By focusing on an overlooked group of Chinese women, this bookgenders the past by showing how these women helped make the present,and it reveals how a group of intellectuals made the transition to theCommunist era.