The YWCA arrived in China as a cultural interloper in 1899. How did activist Christian Chinese women maintain their identity and social relevance through the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century? The YWCA in China explores how the Young Women’s Christian Association responded to the needs of Chinese women and society both before and after the 1949 revolution ushered in a communist state. Western secretaries originally defined the Chinese YWCA movement, but successive generations of Chinese leadership localized its Western-defined organizational ethos. Over time, "the Y" became class conscious and progressive as Chinese women transformed it from a vehicle for moral and material uplift to an instrument for social action and an organizational citizen of China. And after 1949, national YWCA leaders supported the Maoist regime because they believed the social goals of the YWCA aligned with Mao’s revolutionary aims. The YWCA in China is a fascinating investigation of the lives, thinking, and action of women whose varied forms of Christian and Chinese identity were buffeted by historical events that moulded their social philosophies.

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.

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 crippling custom of footbinding is the thematic touchstone for Judy Yung's engrossing study of Chinese American women during the first half of the twentieth century. Using this symbol of subjugation to examine social change in the lives of these women, she shows the stages of "unbinding" that occurred in the decades between the turn of the century and the end of World War II. The setting for this captivating history is San Francisco, which had the largest Chinese population in the United States. Yung, a second-generation Chinese American born and raised in San Francisco, uses an impressive range of sources to tell her story. Oral history interviews, previously unknown autobiographies, both English- and Chinese-language newspapers, government census records, and exceptional photographs from public archives and private collections combine to make this a richly human document as well as an illuminating treatise on race, gender, and class dynamics. While presenting larger social trends Yung highlights the many individual experiences of Chinese American women, and her skill as an oral history interviewer gives this work an immediacy that is poignant and effective. Her analysis of intraethnic class rifts—a major gap in ethnic history—sheds important light on the difficulties that Chinese American women faced in their own communities. Yung provides a more accurate view of their lives than has existed before, revealing the many ways that these women—rather than being passive victims of oppression—were active agents in the making of their own history.

Unbound Voices brings together the voices of Chinese American women in a fascinating, intimate collection of documents—letters, essays, poems, autobiographies, speeches, testimonials, and oral histories—detailing half a century of their lives in America. Together, these sources provide a captivating mosaic of Chinese women's experiences in their own words, as they tell of making a home for themselves and their families in San Francisco from the Gold Rush years through World War II. The personal nature of these documents makes for compelling reading. We hear the voices of prostitutes and domestic slavegirls, immigrant wives of merchants, Christians and pagans, homemakers, and social activists alike. We read the stories of daughters who confronted cultural conflicts and racial discrimination; the myriad ways women coped with the Great Depression; and personal contributions to the causes of women's emancipation, Chinese nationalism, workers' rights, and World War II. The symphony of voices presented here lends immediacy and authenticity to our understanding of the Chinese American women's lives. This rich collection of women's stories also serves to demonstrate collective change over time as well as to highlight individual struggles for survival and advancement in both private and public spheres. An educational tool on researching and reclaiming women's history, Unbound Voices offers us a valuable lesson on how one group of women overcame the legacy of bound feet and bound lives in America. The selections are accompanied by photographs, with extensive introductions and annotation by Judy Yung, a noted authority on primary resources relating to the history of Chinese American women.