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 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.

Jennifer Bond is a Lecturer at University College London. She is a historian of modern China with a focus on gender, education, religion, and diplomacy in the Republican era. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Women’s History, Twentieth Century China, and Global Studies Quarterly. She is the co-founder of the China Academic Network on Gender (CHANGE), a transnational interdisciplinary network for researchers working on gender in China.