This is a very useful collection of seventeen essays on Chinese women Christians between the seventeenth century and about 1919. The editor is Jessie G. Lutz, long a respected scholar in several areas of modern Chinese history, including the pre-1949 Christian colleges, the politics of nationalism in the 1920s, and the early nineteenth century missionary Karl Gutzlaff. For this book, Lutz drew together several scholars to address historical issues concerning Chinese women and Christianity. What factors can help us understand the profound relationship between Chinese women and Christianity in the recent past? Considering that women have for a long time been a majority of Chinese Christian converts, and their importance in the day-to-day running of local parishes is legendary and attested to by many observers, they have been relatively understudied.
The resulting volume here is, like almost all collections of essays, uneven in focus and quality of research and writing. Lutz makes a valiant effort to pull the essays together, by organizing them into several parts, with each part containing from two to four chapters; she also provides a brief lead-in mini-essay at the beginning of each part (Parts II–VI). Her other direct contributions as one of the writers are the general introduction to the volume (Part I) and a “postscript” (Part VII) reflecting on Christianity as a Chinese religion.
Herewith the essentials of the contents, highlighting those essays which I found particularly interesting. The four essays in Part II are very strong. They all deal with the seventeenth or eighteenth century, where source materials are extremely difficult to track down. Gail King looks at the seventeenth century through the life of Candida Xu, granddaughter of the famous Christian official of the late Ming, Xu Guangqi. The other three all deal with the Institute for Christian Virgins and the Virgins as an order of women to serve the church. The Catholic church and the Catholic missionary bishops authorized the Virgins in the eighteenth century, but found it hard to control these women. Gary Tiedemann describes the north China Virgins in his insightful chapter, and Eugenio Menegon describes the phenomenon for northeast Fujian Province, including a stimulating discussion of the transmission of the idea of “Christian chastity” from early modern Europe to China. Robert Entenmann continues his role as a leading scholar on this topic, having “discovered” the Virgins early on. He provides a translation of one of the important Virgin documents—the “rules” for life and behavior for the women—and compares the rules of 1744 to those of 1784. Of course, the Virgins' ideal behavior from the point of view of the Catholic hierarchy was sometimes very different from their actual roles.
In Part III, we look at examples of the “Christian life” of women converts. Peter Chen-main Wang tests the utility of one of the major sources for the first part of the Republican period (1912–1949) by reading all the obituary articles on recently deceased Chinese Christian women appearing in the Chinese-language version of the Chinese Christian Yearbook. These twenty-nine articles were not very different from non-Christians' elegies. Margo Gewurtz does a comparable exercise, tracking women from a database collected from materials concentrating on data for North Henan in the late 1800s to the early 1900s. Some insight is gained on conversion networks, and on congregational life, but the amount of new understanding resulting is modest. Part IV has chapters by Claudia von Collani on Candida Xu again and by Ling Oi Ki on Bible women more generically in the modern period. Part V, “Healing Women,” for which Lutz has written one of her better introductions, features John Stanley's workmanlike description of the beginnings of the modern nursing profession in China early in the twentieth century. It also has a lovely chapter by Connie Shemo on Shi Meiyu, M. D., one of the earliest Chinese woman physicians, focusing on the early part of her career when she was working in mission hospitals; this is one of the best in the volume.
The essays in Part VI rank overall with those in Part II. Ryan Dunch does his usual superb job, here considering creation of a missionary and Chinese “Christian women's ideology” during the years 1870-1930. Dong Wang draws on her immense knowledge of Canton Christian College (later Lingnan) to discuss the role of women there in the twentieth century in a systematic and clear manner. Cristina Zaccarini gives us something different, the story of a child adopted by missionaries and her unusual childhood and journey to adulthood. The volume's last substantive essay is by the editor, who finally addresses directly the term that is part of the title but not extensively dealt with by the other authors—“social mobility.” This could have been stressed more in other chapters of this worthwhile volume.
