Connie Shemo (Associate Professor, SUNY Plattsburgh)

Since the late 1990s, scholars have been suggesting that the future of women’s history is transnational.  However, studies of transnationalism in women’s history frequently center on a movement of ideas and institutions from an imagined “West” to other cultures, often an imagined “East.”  This paper argues that an exploration of the relationships between medical education for women in China, the United States, and Japan challenges this underlying assumption.  Ideas about women becoming physicians did not flow in a unidirectional manner from the United States to China and Japan.  In the early twentieth century an emerging system of medical thought described as “scientific medicine” (or “modern biomedicine”) was transforming medical ideology in all three countries.  Questions of women becoming physicians were inextricably linked with broader issues of ideologies of race, global power relations, and imperialism.   Exploring the complex engagement between the three countries on questions of women becoming physicians, this paper aims to provoke a reconsideration of how past imperialist ideologies continue to impact the terms that govern scholarship on international relations generally, and specifically the writing of transnational women’s history.