Traces Japan's efforts to modernize Taiwan through gendered educational practices In Good Wife, Wise Mother , female education and citizenship serve as a lens through which to examine Taiwan’s uniqueness as a colonial crossroads between Chinese and Japanese ideas and practices. A latecomer to the age of imperialism, Japan used modernization efforts in Taiwan to cast itself as a benevolent force among its colonial subjects and imperial competitors. In contrast to most European colonies, where only elites received an education, in Taiwan Japan built elementary schools intended for the entire population, including girls. In 1897 it developed a program known as “Good Wife, Wise Mother” that sought to transform Han Taiwanese girls into modern Japanese female citizens. Drawing on Japanese and Chinese newspapers, textbooks, oral interviews, and fiction, Fang Yu Hu illustrates how this seemingly progressive project advanced a particular Japanese vision of modernity, womanhood, and citizenship, to which the colonized Han Taiwanese people responded with varying degrees of collaboration, resistance, adaptation, and adoption. Hu also assesses the program’s impact on Taiwan’s class structure, male-female interactions, and political identity both during and after the end of Japanese occupation in 1945. Good Wife, Wise Mother expands the study of Taiwanese history by contributing important gendered and nonelite perspectives. It will be of interest to any historian concerned with questions of modernity, hybridity, and colonial nostalgia. "Fang Yu Hu has written an extensively researched monograph that surveys the effectiveness of Japanese gendered colonial education on local Taiwanese society."―Margaret Mih Tillman, author of Raising China's Revolutionaries "Centering on gender as a powerful marker in shaping colonial politics, Hu offers a precise and nuanced analysis of the complexities of Japanese empire building in Taiwan through the lens of girls’ education. It is an excellent addition to scholarship on the gender ideology of 'good wife, wise mother' from an original and comparative perspective. Her investigation into gendered colonial nostalgia is particularly revealing and insightful."―Hyaeweol Choi, author of Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea "As the first English-language scholarly monograph on the education of Han Taiwanese girls under Japanese rule, Good Wife, Wise Mother contributes to our understanding of women's history in Taiwan and of Japanese colonialism . . . [It] will be of interest to scholars of global women's studies, the comparative history of education in East Asia, and colonial nostalgia."― Journal of Chinese History "Hu effectively analyzes the inherent contradictions of Japanese colonial education."― Pacific Historical Review "[A] thoroughly conceived and clearly written history of the Japanese-era colonial education of Han Taiwanese girls."― Twentieth-Century China "[O]ffers a fresh perspective that moves beyond binary frameworks of colonizer versus colonized, instead highlighting complex relational dynamics in colonial governance. . . . This book is highly recommended for scholars of East Asian women’s history, Taiwanese culture, Japanese colonialism, and gendered life under empire. Even readers interested more generally in Taiwan will find its historical insights accessible and rewarding."― American Historical Review Traces Japan's efforts to modernize Taiwan through gendered educational practices Fang Yu Hu is assistant professor of History at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.