Today, 121 years ago, on October 23, 1904 (September 15, 1904 in the lunar calendar), Beiyang Women's Public School was founded. On October 3, 1904, Tianjin Ta Kung Pao published the Founding Articles of Tianjin Girls' School (that is, the Founding Articles of Beiyang Girls' Public School) signed by the initiator Lu Bicheng, with a total of 26 articles. After the article, there was a notice from the founding managers Ying Lianzhi (general manager of Ta Kung Pao) and Fang Yu (founder of Nippon News Agency), saying: "The building of the engraved school has been built and is scheduled to start on September 15th (October 23rd) (1904)." Lu Bicheng wrote in the Preface to Classmates of Beiyang Women's Public School in 1911: "Beiyang Women's Public School was founded in Mengdong, Jiachen (1904). October 23rd is close to Meng Dong, more than ten days away from Meng Dong. There is no big difference between Ying Lianzhi and Lu Bicheng's confirmation of the founding time of Beiyang Women's Public School. According to the date provided by Ying Lianzhi in Ta Kung Pao, October 23, 1904 should be regarded as the founding day of Beiyang Girls' Public School. Beiyang Women's Normal School, the predecessor of Hebei Normal University and Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, was the earliest women's normal school in China. It was founded by Fu Zengxiang in 1906 with the support of Yuan Shikai, and Lu Bicheng was the supervisor. The school is located at Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, Tianwei Road. The predecessor was "Beiyang Women's Public School" founded in 1904. After 1912, they were successively renamed "Beiyang Women's Normal School", "Zhili Provincial Women's Normal School", "Zhili First Women's Normal School", "Hebei Provincial First Women's Normal School", "Hebei Provincial Women's Normal University", "Hebei Normal University" (Tianjin), etc. The word "women's study" is not a new invention of the reformers. It used to refer to educating women in four contents: women's morality, women's words, women's merits and women's tolerance. By 1905, after the abolition of the imperial examination, "saving the nation by mother education" was also put on the agenda, and it became the consensus of reformers in the ruling and opposition parties to cultivate "virtuous mothers and good wives" who could not only care for their husbands and children, but also be good at IKEA. In the early ten years of last century, women's schools prevailed, and the traditional women's schools, which originally belonged to the family scope, changed to modern women's education. Although women's education in the late Qing Dynasty was still limited to a few women in the elite class, with the establishment of Tianjin Beiyang Women's Normal School, the earliest women's normal school in China, the first generation of female students in China was produced in Tianjin. On the 19th of April 1906, Wang Yun, who lived in her grandfather's house in Rongguangsi Street outside Xuanwumen, Beijing, received an admission notice from Beiyang Women's Normal School, asking Wang Yun to report to Tianjin before the 22nd of this month. In 1906, it was the period when the Qing court implemented the "New Deal" including the establishment of new schools in order to save the fate of the declining West Mountain. Prior to this, women's education in China has been limited to the family scope, and the traditional idea that "women's lack of talent is virtue" has still prevailed in the society for thousands of years. Two years ago, Empress Dowager Cixi was specially allowed to set up a women's school in Zhongnanhai; The previous year, the Qing government officials sent female students to study in Japan. Almost at the same time that Wang Yun reported to Tianjin, Empress Dowager Cixi "faced the department to revitalize women's schools", and it has become a temporary fashion to set up women's schools. Although there are some good studies, women's schools are not universally recognized. Wang Yun, the daughter of Wang Shichen, the last Hanlin, has been fond of reading poetry and books since childhood. After learning the news of the first enrollment of Beiyang Women's Normal School, Wang Yun wanted to sign up for reference, but was strongly opposed by her father. Her second brother Wang Qu understood Wang Yun's feelings very well and secretly took her to the exam behind her father's back. Unexpectedly, Wang Yun actually won the first place. After the admission notice was sent home, Wang Shichen was overjoyed, immediately changed his attitude and readily agreed to his daughter's study in Tianjin. According to Wang Yun's children's recollection, Wang Yun rushed from Beijing to Tianjin in his second brother's mule cart. This photo, which has been broken because of its age, fixed the bright sunshine that shone on the campus of Tianjin Beiyang Women's Normal School in the spring of 1906. At 10 o'clock in the morning on June 13th, 1906 (April 22, the 32nd year of Guangxu), Beiyang Women's Normal School held its opening ceremony in Yaowa, Hebei Province. More than 300 people from all walks of life in Tianjin attended the meeting. Fu Zengxiang, Premier of Tianjin Women's School Affairs, and Lu Bicheng, former chief teacher of Beiyang Women's Public School, attended the opening ceremony. "Ta Kung Pao" advocates that "the development of women's learning from here should be based on this". Female students like Wang Yun are a minority after all. At the beginning of its establishment, there were very few students. Generally, old-fashioned people are reluctant to send their daughters to receive "foreign education". In order to "expand enrollment", Fu Zengxiang and others set up offices in Beijing on the one hand, and sent people to Shanghai to recruit students on the other hand, and promised to subsidize pocket money every month in addition to the expenses of school, meals, books and clothes. After graduation, they would be "distributed" and sent by the school to various places to fulfill their obligations, with a minimum monthly salary of 30 yuan, etc., which attracted more female students to sign up for the exam. Shen Yiyun (wife of Huang Fu, Foreign Minister during the Republic of China), who is in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, went to Shanghai to apply for the exam after reading the advertisement in Shanghai. What is more difficult to learn than enrolling students is the purpose of running a school. For the sake of national education and social impact, what kind of female students should Beiyang female teachers train and in what way should they train female students? Or what kind of people should Chinese women be trained into? What kind of new education should these new women be given? This is a problem that the elites who set up women's schools in those days were very anxious about. According to Liang Qichao's "concept of women's learning", it is best to: "You can be a husband at the top, teach your children at the bottom, be close to IKEA, and be good at seeding far away." To be a western-style professional woman, you should be a traditional wife and mother, who can go to the hall and the kitchen. In 1908, Yang Buwei (later married Zhao Yuanren, a native of Tianjin), who originally wanted to study at Beiyang Women's School, was opposed by his family and finally applied for the Luning Women's School in Nanjing. The entrance examination essay is entitled "The Benefits of Women's Reading", and she actually wrote "boldly": "A woman is the mother of the nation." This kind of thought was absolutely avant-garde at that time. However, at that time, although Liang Qichao, Lu Bicheng and others advocated feminist thoughts, both old-school and some new-school figures, influenced by the popular trend of "virtuous mothers and good wives" in Japan, took knowledgeable wives and mothers as ideal models for new women, and the subjects studied by women were nothing more than medicine and normal education. Interestingly, among the female students studying abroad in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, those studying in the United States mostly studied medicine, while those studying in Japan mostly studied normal education and domestic economics. In 1907, Jin Yamei, the first female student in China, came to Tianjin at the invitation of Yuan Shikai and was appointed as the president of Beiyang Women's Hospital. In the view of this female returnee from a Christian family, service is the most important virtue of women. Let's take a look at the official teaching thought at that time: the Guimao School System promulgated by the Qing court in 1903 stipulated: "Young women should never be allowed to enter school in groups, * market, and should not read more western books or learn foreign customs by mistake", and "they can only be taught at home, or by their mothers or nannies". As the representative of government-run women's schools, the curriculum of Beiyang Women's Normal School combines the characteristics of Chinese traditional culture, western culture and some Japanese cultures, and still takes the traditional moral education such as "women's morality, women's speech, women's appearance and women's merits" as the training. The curriculum focuses on "flexible" contents such as aesthetic education and self-cultivation. Besides self-cultivation, education, Chinese language, houseeconomics and gymnastics, history, geography, pictures, arithmetics, science, calligraphy, handicrafts and other courses can also be taken. This kind of teaching design not only prevented the criticism of conservatives at that time, but also prevented women from having adverse consequences to the court after receiving education, and strictly controlled women's education within the scope of "mother education saves the nation". In the second year after the founding of Tianjin Women's Teachers (1907), the Constitution of Zouding Women's School was officially promulgated, and the number of women's schools grew rapidly to more than 400, which had a far-reaching impact on the fate of a new generation of women on the historical stage and Chinese women for more than a hundred years. Another year later, Wang Yun graduated from Beiyang Women's Teacher and, like most of her classmates, became the first generation of female teachers in China. In the third year of Xuantong's reign in Qing Dynasty (1911), she and her classmates founded Tianjin's first girls' primary school, Tianjin Private Girls' Primary School. In the year when the Revolution of 1911 broke out, Wang Yun met Wang Baozhen, a revolutionary who started the Luanzhou Uprising, and got married in Shanghai two years later. At that time, it was already the Republic of China.