Deploying a spatial approach towards children's everyday life in interwar Hong Kong, this book considers the context-specific development of five transnational movements: the garden city movement; imperial hygiene movement; nationalist sentiments; the Young Women's Christian Association; and the Girl Guide. Locating these transnational cultural movements in four layers of context, from the most immediate to the most global, including the context of Hong Kong, Republican China, the British empire, and global influences, this book shows Hong Kong as a distinctive colonial domain where the imperatives around race, gender and class produced new products of empire where the child, the garden, the school and sport turned out to be the main dynamics in play in the interwar period.

Contributes to the growing spatial history of childhood Brings light to the understudied area of women and children in Hong Kong Draws on photos, oral histories, school publications, diaries, newspapers, and government reports

Autorentext

Stella Meng Wang is a recent PhD graduate of the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney, Australia, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong. Stella's research interests include history of hygiene, history of education, women's history, urban history, and history of architecture and health.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. Garden City: Urban Reform, Colonial Domesticity, and Spaces of Play in Childhood, 1921-1941.- 3. Building Healthy Schools: Architecture of Fitness in Hong Kong, 1901-1941.- 4. Treading a Different Path: Gender and the Literary Space at St. Stephen's Girls' College, 1921-1941.- 5. Lifting Girls: Chinese Women and the YWCA in Hong Kong, 1921-1941.- 6. Reimagining the Colonial Space: Femininity and the Everyday Life of Girl Guides in Hong Kong, 1921-1941.- 7. Conclusion