Abstract: This article traces the early development of women’s schools during the waning years of the Qing dynasty. It documents and analyzes the competing pressures and goals that eventually led to the establishment of public schools for girls and the ideological changes that made this radical change not only acceptable but desirable. The establishment of normal schools for girls and women in China was the unintended result of state efforts to penetrate and control early childhood education, which had traditionally been a family affair. Ultimately, it was the Qing state’s concern about controlling the training of teachers that led it to accept and then intervene in the development of female education and especially normal schools for women. This remarkable change opened the doors of public education to women and provided women with a 1egitimate role in the public domain as professional teachers, developments that forever altered the position of women in Chinese society.