Dreaming the New Woman: An Oral History of Missionary Schoolgirls in Republican China
This talk will introduce key findings from my new book entitled Dreaming the New Woman (Oxford, 2024). The book uncovers the voices of Chinese women who attended Protestant missionary schools for girls in the early twentieth century. It is an oral history based on seventy-five interviews with alumnae from five girls’ middle schools across East China, including McTyeire and St. Mary’s in Shanghai, Riverside Academy in Ningbo, Hangzhou Union Girls’ School in Hangzhou, and the Laura Haygood School in Suzhou. In the past, missionary schoolgirls have been labeled “foreign puppets” or have been seen as “passive recipients” of a Western-style education. This book puts at the center of the analysis pupils’ own understanding of what it meant to be female, Chinese, and possibly Christian during the wars and revolutions of the first half of China’s turbulent twentieth century. By focusing on the experiences of women who attended these schools, the book provides fresh perspectives on the role of Christianity in the emergence of the Chinese New Woman. It explores how students experimented with new roles as they tried on overlapping school, Christian, patriotic, gendered, and Communist identities. In the process they envisioned a new form of gendered Christian modernity which became a part of an elite identity for Chinese women in the Republican era.
All welcome- this seminar is free to attend, but booking is required.
This page was last updated on 14 March 2025
