In the spotlight: The Three 'Doctoral Sisters' in 1930s Brussels
The Wang sisters' dissertations (1933)
In July 1932, Wang Changbao 王長寶 (b. 1906), Wang Ximin 王錫民 (b. 1909) and Wang Yazheng 王亞徵 (b. 1912) defended their doctoral dissertation at the Free University of Brussels. Each of the sisters had worked on a societal issue tied to the Chinese Republic at the time. Wang Changbao researched the sociopolical condition of women in Chinese society while Wang Ximin focused on labor by Chinese women and children and Wang Yazheng elaborated on the situation of the country's opium problem.
 |
| Photo of all the Wang siblings (1929). The woman seated is Changbao. Behind her is Ximin. Yahzeng is on the right. |
The women graduated with flying colors and could close a decade-long chapter in their life that had started with their father's new position at the Chinese legation in Brussels.
The published versions of dissertations followed one year later and contained prefaces penned by high-profile political figures. Wang Xinmin's work was accompanied by the words of Emile Vandervelde, a Belgian socialist. The prefaces for Wang Changbao's dissertation was written by Georgette Ciselet, Belgian senator, and Cécile Brunschvicg, a French feminist. Finally, Henri Rolin, another socialist politician, penned a few pages for Wang Yazheng. |
| Cover pages of the 1933 publications |
Exploring the exception of the exception
To start, it is important to remind it is not an everyday occurence to run into works personally produced by Chinese in early 20th century Europe, let alone women. Chinese women studying in Belgium were, in fact, far less common than their male counterparts. This has to do with three factors: the collective imagings of what women could do and where they could be in Chinese society, the slow development of spaces for girls in China's educational system, and the lagging public investment into women to pursue overseas studies, which was (and still is) a very costly undertaking. This aspect of the dissertations is also historically acknowlegded, specifically in the 1935 coverage of the Wang sisters by Zhang Ruogu 張若谷, a student at the KU Leuven.
Although the Wang sisters are undoubtedly part of the elite circles who have more resources for overseas education than the Average Joe, their doctoral dissertations are still an interesting case of what it means to produce knowledge about one’s country and in particular abroad. One wonders: If someone went to a foreign country and wanted to research a topic related to their homeland in the past, what resources were available abroad to use? How did they write about a country that is othered by the environment of where they were based? Who did they cite as a reliable resource? Who did they ignored? Who was the audience of the research and how did they engage with said audience through the text? How did the discourse in one’s work situate among the conversations around the same topic across the globe?
It is very hard the reconstruct the reception and impact of their research in Belgium, but from what I have gathered, it seems that al least two sisters made use of their educational experience back in the homeland where they continued to write on social topics, with Wang Changbao's 1934 article on the position of Belgian women in civil law (比國婦女在民法上之地位) in the Beijing-based Law Review and Wang Yazheng's 1934 writings on opium trade (殖民政府与鸦片) in Opium a National Issue.