Dreaming the new woman: an oral history of missionary schoolgirls in republican China
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 se...
| Riepilogo: | 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 This 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 labelled as 'foreign puppets' or seen as 'passive recipients' of a western-style education. This book puts at the centre of the analysis pupils own understanding of what it meant to be female, Chinese and possible Christian during the wars and revolutions of the first half of China's turbulent twentieth century. By focusing on the experience of women who attended these schools, this 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 |
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| Descrizione fisica: | xi, 280 Seiten, Illustrationen |
| ISBN: | 978-0-19-765479-8 |
