This volume on Christian Women in Chinese Society is the fourth book in a series edited by Philip L. Wickeri which grew out of a conference held in Hong Kong in 2015. It comprises eleven essays dealing with Chinese women's contribution to Christian life in the church, in education and in social service. The authors are academics, scholars and journalists in fields covering theology, history, religious studies, gender studies, sociology, and intersections of all these.
Previous studies have emphasized the role of Christian missionaries in the anti-footbinding movement and the promotion of female education, mostly focusing on the role of missionaries rather than Chinese women themselves. This series of books closes this gap by honing in on the life stories of women and the ways in which their personal stories connect with the history of the Christian mission in China. As the editors tell us in the Introduction, by the late 19th century, women outnumbered men by some considerable margin in the missionary community (p. 5) in Asia. It is all the more astonishing, therefore, that such scant attention has been paid to the female side of the mission thus far.
Whether Christianity is a collaborator or liberator in relation to the oppressive patriarchal culture for women in Asia is an ongoing debate that is as relevant in the contemporary mission as it was in the historical one. While Christianity has played an important role in the social transformation of China, it is also closely intertwined with colonial history in China. The patriarchal nature of most contemporary Chinese churches is difficult to ignore and sits oddly with the widely held view that the growth of Chinese Christianity heralds a wider social or political transformation in China.
As one might expect, the role of women involved in the mission was not as feminists or liberators, but as models of public morality and religious principle and to live out a Christian ideal of womanhood in private and public life (p. 5); Christian education had the primary purpose of making Chinese women better wives, better mothers, and a fertile ground for evangelical work (p. 6). However, despite the conservative values they espoused, the single, liberated Western missionary women who had left their homes, gone to school, had careers and had gone out into the world, acted as role models for many of their pupils, thus providing an indirect transformative education.
The volume is divided into four sections covering events, people and institutions from the 1840s to the 1970s. The sections focus respectively on cross-cultural partnerships, women and ordained ministry, life histories, and serving the community. The different chapters mostly take a personal biographical approach focusing on the lives of the individual women portrayed and are without exception infused with respect and admiration, guided by the desire to acknowledge the role of women to whom too little attention has been previously paid. For example, Philip Wickeri's chapter focuses on the ordination to priesthood of Florence Li Tim Oi, who became the first woman priest in the Anglican communion; due to a shortage of male priests and lay leaders, there was a need “to give women more authority and responsibility” (p. 109). Jennifer Lin's chapter is devoted to her great-grandmother Zhan Aimei whose life changed course after being sent to a girls’ boarding school run by Anglican women. By narrating her story, Lin also provides interesting insights into the tactics and motivations on both the side of the missionaries and the local population. As Lin says, “[s]ome parents openly hoped the missionaries would find husbands for their daughters, and the foreign teachers were not above obliging them” (p. 187). In one of the few chapters taking a more conceptual approach, Kwok Pui-lan raises interesting questions about the way mission work in China affected work and ministry in the Church of England by, for example, the ground-breaking ordination of women in South China. She also asks whether mission work for women in China differed from mission work in other parts of the world, providing pertinent comparative examples from mission work in Muslim societies and African countries.
The volume provides an important record and one small piece of what is still a scantily drafted canvas of a gender-balanced version of modern Chinese history. The chapters do adopt a general tone of adulation bordering on hagiography which may restrict the interest in this volume to those concerned with missionary or church history; it may be a little difficult to access for those used to a more critical or conceptual engagement with sources. These reservations notwithstanding, the individual histories do illustrate the ways in which lives were transformed and emancipated, often through contingency, circumstance, and unintended consequences, yet nonetheless impacting deeply on local communities as well as the mission as a whole, sparking important debates about the role of women in the Church and mission.
