Claiming Our Heritage: Chinese Women and Christianity

Claiming Our Heritage: Chinese Women and Christianity Kwok Pui-lan he history of Protestant Christianity in China has been Christian women in passing, or tell the stories of a few notable T interpreted largely from the missionary perspective. Christian women, such as the Song sisters, Li Dequan, Deng KennethS.Latourette,in his monumentalstudyof more than900 Yuzhi, and Wu Yifang, without offering many details about the pages, A History of Christian Missions in China, records compre time and context in which they lived. hensively the work and contribution of the missionaries.' The Scholars in women's history have paid more attention to memoirs of both male and female missionaries, such as Robert women's writings, autobiographies, letters, diaries, private pa Morrison, Timothy Richard, Harriet Newell Noyes, and Welthy pers, and other unpublished works. Treating women as subjects, Honsinger, fill out the details of the activities and private lives of missionaries in China.' When Chinese scholars such as Ng Lee-ming and Lam Wing-hung began to study mission history from the Chinese The relationship of Chinese side, they focused on the lives and thought of Chinese male Christian women to the Christians and their responses to the social change of China.' But thestoryof Chinesewomenin Christianityhas seldombeentold. unfolding drama of the Their relationship to the unfolding drama of the missionary missionary movement has movement has never been the subject of serious academic study. never had serious academic This oversight is hardly justifiable, since according to a national report of 1922 women constituted 37 percent of the Protestant study. communicants, and the number of women sitting in the pew certainly was far greater.' they have attached more importance on how women have expe rienced and interpreted their lives rather than what has been On Writing Women's History in the Church written about them. The major difficulty of doing research on Chinese Christian women in the earlier period of the missionary Scholars have not paid attention to Chinese women in the study movement is that the majority of them were illiterate. The first of the history of Christianity in China for many reasons. Until school for girls was opened by an English woman missionary in women's history became a respectable field several decades ago, 1844 in Ningbo, and Christian colleges for women were not the contributions of womenin history have been largelyignored. instituted until the early twentieth century. The lives and work of women missionaries have been taken up There are very few resources by Chinese women in the as serious subject matter only fairly recently. Several books nineteenth century, except some short articles in [iaohui xinbao published in the past few years, including Jane Hunter's Gospel (Church News) and Wanguo gongbao (Globe Magazine). In the of Gentility and Patricia R. Hill's The World Their Household, early twentieth century, when Chinese women's journals and contribute to our knowledge of the public and private lives of newspapers mushroomed in Shanghai and Beijing, Christian American women missionaries." womenalso beganto publish more in the two Christianwomen's Chinese womenwere often assumed to be passive recipients journals: Niiduobao (Woman's Messenger) and Niiqingnian rather than active participants and were treated more as (YWCA magazine). Several books and pamphlets were written missiological objects, rather than as subjects in the encounter by Christian women, such as Hu Binxia's study of the history of between China and Christianity. They did not leave behind the Chinese YWCA, the autobiographies of Cai Sujuan and Zeng many books and writings, their voices were seldom recorded in Baosun, and a study of Chinese women's movements by Wang reports and minutes of church gatherings, and they were not Liming. KangCheng(Ida Kahn), JiangHezhen, andZengBaosun ordained until more than a century after the first Chinese man contributed English articles to the Chinese Recorder, Woman's wasordained. Theircontributions wereregarded as insignificant Workin the Far East,and the International Reviewof Missions." and trivial compared to those of their male counterparts. Besides thesewritten materials, the papers of a few Christian Even when one decides to research the lives of Chinese women leaders, such as Shi Meiyu (Mary Stone) and Kang Christian women, the difficulties of locating resources and de Cheng, are preserved in the General Commission on Archives veloping a workable methodology are formidable. Scholars who and History of the United Methodist Church. The papers of the have worked on the history of Chinese women, including Ono United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia, located at Kazuko, Elisabeth Croll, Kay Ann Johnson, and Phyllis Andors, Yale Divinity School, contain invaluable resources on female are not particularly interested in Christian women and their Christian educators and graduates of the Christian colleges for involvement in society. Other books and studies might mention women. Other helpful resources in reconstructing the lives of Chi KwokPui-lan isvisitingtheologian atAuburn Theological Seminary andlecturer at nese Christian women include the Chinese sermons of mission UnionTheological Seminary, New York. Shereceived herdoctorate from Harvard aries and Chinese preachers, church yearbooks, national church Divinity School and teaches theology at theChinese UniversityofHongKong. She surveys, and even obituaries of women. The reports to the is the authorof Chinese Women and Christianity, 1860-1927 and coeditor of various denominational women's boards of foreign missions Inheriting Our Mothers' Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Per and the private correspondence of women missionaries contain spective. rich data and often interesting materials on the "native women" 150 INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH they worked with. When using materials by the missionaries, readily than did women in the cities, since rural populations special care must be taken to contrast and verify the accounts to tended to be less bound by the dominant Confucian tradition and avoid a one-sided interpretation. Missionary reports and writ since rural women were less secluded. Also, young girls and ings must also be analyzed and evaluated in the Chinese social older women, being situated somewhat at the margin of the and cultural context. family system, had more time to participate in church activities After the collection of data, the process of reconstructing the and more freedom to explore new identities. In the beginning, lives of Christian women from the pieces and sometimes frag some of them had to overcome family prejudice and disapproval ments of materials gathered is equally demanding. First, we when they attended worship services or Bible studies of a "for should emphasize that Chinese women were integral partners in eign religion." the historical drama, and we have to place them at the center of For those who overcame various barriers to become Chris our historical reconstruction. Women's responses to mission tians, Christianity offered them new symbolic resources to look work and the barriers forbidding them to participate in Christian at the world and themselves. In the process of adapting to the activity influenced the policies of Christian missions and the Chinese context,there was a process of "feminizationof religious organization of local congregations. Their participation in con symbolism" in Christianity, especially in the nineteenth cen gregationallife and in wider society needs to be analyzed. More tury." Missionaries emphasized the compassion of God, used important, their subjective interpretation of their own faith and both male and female images of the divine, downplayed the sin experiences inthe life of the church has to be clarified. This latter of Eve, and stressed that Jesus befriended women. In a land aspect should be the special task of scholars in religious studies, where both men and women worshiped strong female religious since most historians do not pay much attention to it or do not figures such as Guanyin and Mazu, the feminization of Christi have the theological background to interpret it. anity made it more appealing. Later on, as more single women Chinese Christian women did not exist in a vacuum, and missionaries arrived in China, the total number of female mis their history must be interpreted in the wider historical and sionaries exceeded that of the male missionaries. The feminiza social transformations of modern Chinese history. In particular, tion of the mission force sometimes gave the impression that their responses to social changes need to be compared with those Christianity wasprimarily for women and children. of the vast majority of women who did not share their faith. The Similar to the Chinese popular religious sects, the Christian influence of Christian women on the feminist movement in congregations offered channels to women in which they could China and vice versa has to be closely studied. Their social analysis and strategyfor social change should be contrasted with those of the socialist feminists and other secular feminists. Victorian ideals of women's The womenmissionaries, too, did not act in a vacuum. An understanding of gender relationships and roles in the church domesticity and and society they came from would help to clarify their motiva subordination influenced tion and work in China. The Victorian ideals of womanhood, stressing women's

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