Women's work for women: Chinese Christian women and Western missionaries in Canton, South China, 1847--1938.

摘要

The slogan, "Woman's work for woman," represented the zeal of the American women's missionary movement from the mid-nineteenth to the First World War (1914-18). Influenced by evangelical Protestant religious revivals, American women committed to serve non-White women and children in their home country as well as in non-European areas of the world, including China. This dissertation challenges the dominant missionary notion underlying "woman's work for woman," which presumes a binary understanding of women as either givers or takers and reinforces the essentialization of "woman" as a category. In actuality, both women missionaries and local women contributed to local women's work in the expansion of global Christianity at the turn of the century. Through a regional study of Christian women's work at the Canton Mission of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (later on merged into the Church of Christ in China) from 1847 to 1938, this dissertation demonstrates the dynamic intercultural cooperation and negotiations of "women's work for women" between and among Chinese Christian women and women missionaries. Significantly, it affirms that women missionaries and newly empowered Chinese Christian women formed a negotiable space for "women's work for women," providing educational, social, and medical services, as well as evangelizing work for Chinese women in Canton, South China. This study demonstrates the multiple agencies in these two categories of women, in response to changing contexts in the US and in China. Adding to other biographical and institutional studies, this dissertation examines the network of the local Christian women's community, which expanded through denominational and interdenominational ties, social (between alma mater and alumna), and individual (both natal and marital families, and intergenerational connections), as well as national and transnational relationships.