Chinese theologian Kwok Pui-lan draws on a wide variety of archival material to reconstruct the life of Chinese women in the church. She analyzes their participation in social reform, and looks at their relationship to the feminist movement in China. Compared to their Chinese sisters, Christian women had more prolonged exposure to Western civilization through the Christian Church, mission schools, and Christian benevolence. Their responses, shows Kwok, provide rare information on how Chinese women reacted to foreign influences and religion in particular. At the same time, Kwok'sstudy broadens our understanding of how Christianity adapts to and functions in a totally new cultural context.

By exploring the interplay among gender, religion, and modernity, this book exposes the part Chinese Christian women played in China’s quest for a strong nation in general and in Republican Beijing’s modern transformation in particular. Focusing on the Beijing Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the author examines how the Association, guided by the Christian tenet “to serve, not to be served,” tailored its Western models and devised new programs to meet the city’s demands. Its enterprises ranged from providing women- and child-oriented facilities to promoting constructive recreational activities and from reforming home and family to improving public health. Through an analysis of these endeavors, the author argues that the Chinese YW women's contribution to the city's modernity was a creative embodiment of the then socially targeted missionary movement known as the Social Gospel. In the process, they demonstrated their distinctive new ideals of womanhood featuring practicality, social service, and broad cooperation. These qualities set them apart from both traditional women and other brands of the New Woman. While criticized as trivial, their efforts, however, pioneered modern social service in China and complemented what municipal authorities and other progressive groups undertook to modernize the city.

The second volume on Christianity in China covers the period from 1800 to the present day, dealing with the complexities of both Catholic and Protestant aspects.

Chinese Christian women before the New Culture Movement and the May 4th Movement of 1919 have been largely invisible in the records of China missions and Chinese Christianity. We have known little about them either as individuals or as a group. The contributors of this volume have scoured a variety of sources to recreate the role of early Chinese women Christians in the life of the church and in Chinese society and to illustrate how gender affected their understanding of Christianity and their career choices. How did the Chinese context alter their relations with the church and with Christian and non-Christian communities? What was the legacy of pioneer Chinese Christian women? Essays on Chinese Christian educators, doctors, nurses, and evangelists show how the missionaries and the church made mobility and broadened horizons possible for women. They reveal also the contributions of these women and homemakers to a changing China.

This edited volume explores the complex roles that Christian ideas and institutions played in the construction of modern womanhood in East Asia. While contributing to gender dynamics that disprivileged women in China, Japan, and Korea, Christianity was also instrumental in women’s efforts to empower themselves and participate in the public sphere. Many literate East Asian women mobilized Christian beliefs, knowledge, institutions, and networks to raise the profile of “The Woman Question,” frame the contours of the related debate, and craft original responses. These chapters examine East Asian women who were markedly influenced by Christianity as students, trainees, educators, professionals, and activists. Using their increased visibility and resources, they addressed the dilemmas and promises of modernity for women in their countries.

Christian Women in Chinese Society: The Anglican Story expands on the long-standing debates about whether Christianity is a collaborator in or a liberating force against the oppressive patriarchal culture for women in Asia. Women have played an important role in the history of Chinese Christianity, but their contributions have yet to receive due recognition, partly because of the complexities arising out of the historical tension between Western imperialism and Chinese patriarchy. Single women missionaries and missionary spouses in the nineteenth century set the early examples of what women could do to spread the Gospel, yet they might not have intended to instill the same free spirit into their Chinese converts. The education provided to Chinese women by missionaries was expected to turn them into good wives and mothers, but knowledge empowered the students, allowing them to become full participants not only in the Church but also in the wider society. Together, the Western female missionaries and the Chinese women whom they trained explored their newfound freedom and tried out their roles with the help of each other. These developments culminated in the ordination of Florence Li Tim Oi to priesthood in 1944, a singular event that fundamentally changed the history of the Anglican Communion. At the heart of this collection lies the rich experience of those women, both Chinese and Western, who devoted their lives to the propagation of Anglicanism across different regions of mainland China and Hong Kong. Contributors make the most of the sources to reconstruct their voices and present sympathetic accounts of these remarkable women’s achievements. “This inspiring volume restores women converts and missionaries to their central place in the history of Chinese Christianity. Its critical re-evaluation of the contribution of women to the Anglican church in China reconfigures our understanding of mission and of the construct of Chinese womanhood.” —Chloë Starr, Yale University “This engaging volume provides a rounded and nuanced picture of the role of women in the history of the Anglican church in China by approaching it from multiple perspectives. A must-read for those interested in Asian Christianity or the role of women in the history of the church.” —Judith Berling, Graduate Theological Union “This wide-ranging collection offers a re-appraisal of the role of women in Anglican mission in China. Careful and detailed scholarship allows women’s often painful stories to be told afresh. Like all good collections, this book serves to challenge assumptions, stimulate research, and provoke further questions.” —Mark D. Chapman, University of Oxford