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Based on seventy-five oral history interviews,
Dreaming the New Woman uncovers the voices of Chinese women who attended Protestant missionary schools for girls in China in the early twentieth century. By focusing on the experience of women who attended these schools, Jennifer Bond provides fresh perspectives on the role of Christianity in the emergence of the Chinese New Woman. The book explores how girls negotiated overlapping school, patriotic, Christian, gendered, and Communist identities during China's turbulent twentieth century of wars and revolutions.
List of contents
- Note on Chinese Sources
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1: Establishing Missionary Schools for Girls in East China
- 2: Envisioning a Gendered Christian Republic
- 3: Dreaming the New Woman
- 4: Awakening: The War
- 5: Negotiating Christian and Communist Identities
- 6: Reimagining Missionary Schools for Girls
- Appendix: List of Interviewees
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Jennifer Bond is a Lecturer at University College London. She is a historian of modern China with a focus on gender, education, religion, and diplomacy in the Republican era. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Women's History, Twentieth Century China, and Global Studies Quarterly. She is the co-founder of the China Academic Network on Gender (CHANGE), a transnational interdisciplinary network for researchers working on gender in China.
Summary
Based on extensive oral history interviews, Dreaming the New Woman uncovers the experiences of girls who attended missionary middle schools in Republican China in the first half of the twentieth century. Chinese missionary schoolgirls were often labelled "foreign puppets" or seen as passive recipients of a western-style education. By focusing on the pupils' own perspectives and drawing on seventy-five oral history interviews conducted with missionary school alumnae, alongside student writings, missionary reports, and newspaper sources, this fascinating book provides fresh insights into what it meant to be Chinese, female, and Christian during the first half of China's turbulent twentieth century.
The oral history interviews show how missionary schoolgirls weathered periods of anti-Christian hostility, experimented with new gender roles at school, experienced the Second Sino-Japanese War in Shanghai, and applied Christianity to the Communist cause after 1949. Jennifer Bond reveals how pupils used their schools as a laboratory, blending different ideas from Christianity, nationalism, Communism, and feminism to forge new notions of Chinese womanhood. Girls skillfully combined Christian aspects of missionary education such as the rhetoric of "service" with discussion of women's roles in nation building to widen their sphere of operation in society. The daily practices and lifestyles within the hybrid cultural environment of missionary schools fostered new identities that influenced the girls' aspirations and later careers. A fluency in English, western social graces, and membership in Christian churches admitted them as members of a new western-educated Chinese elite that emerged in the Republican era.
Additional text
The final two chapters-on, respectively, the takeover of the schools in 1949 and the revival, with help from alumnae, of their names and traditions in the post-Mao era-are particularly interesting. Highly recommended.
