Overview

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.

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9780197654798

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This book provides an engaging description of the lives and attitudes of the cosmopolitan women from China's social elite who were educated in a small number of elite missionary-run girls' schools in the 1940s. Some of these women went on to become extremely famous: Song Meiling later Mme Chiang Kai-shek, the novelist Zhang Ailing, and the Nobel prize-winning scientist Tu Youyou were all educated at the schools Bond discusses. Others followed a wide range of professional careers in China and several of them later in the US. The use of oral history is theoretically aware and sophisticated and the book makes arguments that will be important for scholars of modern Chinese history more broadly as well as those who are interested in the history of Christianity in China and Asian American history. * Henrietta Harrison, Professor of Modern Chinese Studies, University of Oxford China Centre * Dreaming the New Woman offers an innovative perspective on missionary girls' schools in China and their effect on women's later lives and work. Rather than concentrate on the schools as missionary institutions or the experience of missionary women teachers, Jennifer Bond puts students front and center. She shows us how they negotiated both the quotidian experience of being a student and the intersection with large historical events, including the anti Christian movement, the Japanese invasion, and the Communist revolution. The examination of student writings, in all their adolescent high-mindedness, is skillfully done. * Gail Hershatter, Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus, University of California Santa Cruz *

Author Information

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.

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