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Was there a way out for girls to seek upward mobility and end poverty?
Girls’ education had narrowed the gender gap in literacy and provided more equal opportunities for girls to move up the social ladder. Literacy, at least, provided them with new capacities to find an improved position in a patriarchal society.
The earliest girls’ schools were set up by missionary bodies, the government, and the Chinese community and were motivated by moral, evangelical, and socio-economic considerations. The educational purpose and approach varied over time. By providing moral instruction and domestic training, the earliest initiatives were to nurture girls to be good wives and mothers in families. As Hong Kong underwent rapid economic and social changes in the 20th century, notions of modernity added new expectations for academic and professional achievements. The roles and identities of women were being constructed and reconstructed along with societal change.
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The sisters of the French Convent School received their first orphan girls in 1848.
Courtesy of the Sisters of St. Paul de Chartres, Hong Kong.
The sisters of the French Convent School received their first orphan girls in 1848. Courtesy of the Sisters of St. Paul de Chartres, Hong Kong.
Boarders of the Italian Convent School at play.
Courtesy of the Canossian Missions Historic Archives, Hong Kong.
Boarders of the Italian Convent School at play. Courtesy of the Canossian Missions Historic Archives, Hong Kong.
Cassock department industrial room, Hong Kong, c.1930.
Courtesy of the Maryknoll Mission Archives.
Cassock department industrial room, Hong Kong, c.1930. Courtesy of the Maryknoll Mission Archives.
The first commercial school since 1907.
Courtesy of the Canossian Missions Historic Archives, Hong Kong.
The first commercial school since 1907. Courtesy of the Canossian Missions Historic Archives, Hong Kong.
Multicultural staff and students of Belilios Public School, 1890s.
Courtesy of Belilios Public School.
Multicultural staff and students of Belilios Public School, 1890s. Courtesy of Belilios Public School.
As early as the late 1840s, missionary bodies had started to provide orphanage and learning for destitute, abandoned, and trafficked girls. Education also came with religious instruction.
The French Convent School, founded in 1854 (the former of St. Paul’s Convent School); the Italian Convent School, founded in 1860 (now Sacred Heart Canossian College); and the Diocesan Native Female Training School (later Diocesan Girls’ School), founded in same year, were among the earliest of girls’ schools in the city.
As Hong Kong continued to thrive as an entrepôt, the government developed public education to sustain socio-economic developments, resulting in the establishment of the Central School for Girls in 1890 (later renamed Belilios Public School).
Chinese elites requested schools offering Western education and cultivating a distinctive Chinese cultural identity for girls from respectable families. In 1906, in response, St. Stephen’s Girls’ College was established.