Volume 3,Issue 8
Missionary Strategies and the Transformation of Women’s Vocational Education in China (1880s-1920s): Professionalization, Control and the Paradox of Empowerment
This paper critically reassesses a pivotal transformation in Protestant missions in China: the reconfiguration of female education from cultivating evangelistic auxiliaries to professionalizing women as foundational agents of the indigenous church. Moving beyond narratives of either benevolent modernization or cultural imperialism, it argues that this shift was a contingent and often contradictory response to internal institutional crises. Drawing on internal mission discourse, institutional reports, and pedagogical debates in The Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal, the study traces a deliberate yet contested trajectory from instrumentalized training (1880s–1890s), aimed at producing compliant intermediaries, to an institutionalized model (1900–1920), designed to sustain ecclesial infrastructure. It highlights how Chinese women exercised agency, negotiating, subverting, and repurposing vocational frameworks, while transnational reformist ideas further complicated missionary ambitions. The paper concludes that this forty-year project embodies the central paradox of mission strategy: the attempt to devolve operational authority while retaining ideological control, a project continually reshaped by local actors and structural contingencies.
[1] Latourette K, 1929, A History of Christian Missions in China. Macmillan, New York.
[2] Said E, 1978, Orientalism. Vintage Books, New York.
[3] Hunter J, 1984, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China. Yale University Press, New Haven.
[4] Dunch R, 2001, Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857–1927. Yale University Press, New Haven.
[5] Viswanathan G, 1998, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. Columbia University Press, New York.
[6] Bays D, 2012, A New History of Christianity in China. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.
[7] Lutz J, 1971, China and the Christian Colleges, 1850–1950. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
[8] Hofmeyr I, 2004, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
[9] Sinha M, 1995, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester University Press, Manchester.
[10] Kwok P, 1992, Chinese Women and Christianity, 1860–1927. Scholars Press, Atlanta.
[11] Lian X, 1997, The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907–1932. Penn State Press, University Park.
[12] Cohen P, 1997, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth. Columbia University Press, New York.
[13] Weber M, 1978, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Roth G & Wittich C, Eds. & Trans.). University of California Press, Berkeley. (Original work published 1922)
[14] Stoler A, 2002, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. University of California Press, Berkeley.
[15] Foucault M, 1990, The History of Governmentality. In Burchell G, Gordon C, Miller P (Eds.), The Foucault Effect. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
[16] Scott J, 1990, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale University Press, New Haven.