JenniferBond: Dreaming the New Woman: An Oral History of Missionary Schoolgirls in Republican China. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024; pp. 280

The interrelations between religion, culture, gender and modernity in the first half of the twentieth century present historians with contested and overlapping studies. When looking at the histories of Protestant missionary activity in China from the early Republic to the establishment of the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC), the legacies of these contradictory social imaginaries are cogent. Historians also have faced a threshold question in the evidence before them: the silencing of the voices of the Chinese who were the subjects of missionary activities. There is now a wide literature on anti-foreign campaigns, and on the histories of independent churches and breakaway Christian movements. Yet stories of the Chinese views of day-to-day encounters, resistance or empowerment, anger or desire, have been almost impossible to uncover. Images of Chinese Christians populate missionary literature, but they are constantly constructed as joyous converts, helpful church workers and Biblewomen, and are rarely caught on the historical record speaking directly of their own experiences. Jennifer Bond's study of the memories and voices of Chinese mission schoolgirls is an important contribution to filling this gap in history. The missionary actors in her histories become invisible, and even the Chinese teachers are given time only in their interactions with the girls. Bond's focus is on girls-only secondary schools. This she argues is because by the 1920s most missionaries working in China were women, and most missions recognised that the women-only world of Chinese traditional culture had to be respected. Many missions were also of the view that it was strategic to work for the conversion of the wealthy or educated classes, who would in turn lead the rest of the population to Christianity. Jennifer Bond provides us with a detailed recording of entirely new stories, told from the writings of the schoolgirls, and from oral interviews. Bond interviewed 75 women who attended five East coast girls' schools from the 1920s to 1952, when the schools were reorganised into government run secondary schools. Stories, anecdotes, and recurring images and motifs are poignant, as her subjects were all in their eighties or nineties, with little time to capture further knowledge. There are shocks and revelations along the way in this book, and some enduring iconic images of Chinese women's resistance and resolution. “Dreaming the New Woman” is the collective imaginary that hold these memories together, as Bond explores the ambivalences of China's twentieth-century modernising. These girls were committed to recreating their lives along the promise of becoming the New Women of China, to lead their people into a new age. They were daughters of the élite of the treaty ports and had access to the new consumer culture of western modernity, the life of the Modern Girl, celebrated in popular culture. They were also participating in an American model of girls' schooling with its access to Western language and values. Yet they recall clearly how they did not see the idea of the New Woman as a direct importation or colonialism from the West. They were prepared to make modern lives on Chinese terms, to wear the qipao, (cheongsam), to listen to modern Chinese music, and to visit cinemas. For these schoolgirls the ideal of the New Woman was aligned with a concept of gendered Christian citizenship. But over time, Christianity appeared to play progressively less of a role in their thinking. Despite the schools' Protestantism, it becomes clear that only a minority of girls converted to Christianity, while the majority adopted elements of the Christian message, subsumed in middle-class American cultural and gender roles. They remember the impact of the schools' music programmes, singing hymns, playing Western church music, performances with choirs and orchestras. These illuminated Bible stories but also demonstrated the girls' access to Western high culture. The most enduring message from the missionaries was Christian social and ethical teaching, on equality, justice, women's rights, and duty. The girls ran social work programmes in local primary schools, hospitals and visiting the poor, working with groups like the Chinese Young Women's Christian Association, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, teaching classes, and running outreach programmes. Their visions of a new China remained gendered through ideals of women as citizens who continued the traditional Chinese virtues of “wise wife-good mother,” but they assumed that their academic education would lead to further study in Chinese universities, or in the United States. Although their career options might be limited, they would use their education to combine work and family. There is a wide literature on the Chinese New Woman and the Modern Girl, but most historians have investigated the writings of contemporary Chinese intellectuals, Chinese feminists, Chinese Communists and the work of the Nationalist government in the 1930s. Bond's contribution is to show how educated girls themselves negotiated arguments over national pride, modernisation and new forms of gender. One overriding contradiction was that the schools remained inside a bubble of American Protestant culture, almost immune to their surroundings in the treaty ports. English was the language of instruction, and curriculum, education theory, school organisation and student culture were directly imported from the US. Students joined class societies, sporting teams, and loyalty groups, just as their missionary teachers had done back home. Mandarin was only taught in one class and the teacher, at least in one case, was ridiculed by the students. Students made it clear that what they wanted from the schools was an academic Western education. For most, Christianity was embedded in a cultural envelope of class, custom and culture, and this was the exchange required. These were the qualifications for moving with ease within the élite treaty port societies of Anglo-American business classes, and the old élites of traditional Chinese society. The book charts a fascinating sequence of hot spots or disturbances in the lives of the women, where most are jolted out of any complacency about the new China they might have envisioned. The May 30th Incident in Shanghai in 1925 where British soldiers massacred Chinese students, the second Sino-Japanese war, the Rape of Nanjing, the Chinese civil war of the 1930s, and the Chinese declaration of war against the US in the Korean War, were all incursions that shocked students out of their old lives and into a new world, where Americans were cast as foreign imperialists, where their teachers were evacuated out of China, where Japanese became a compulsory subject in school, and where all five schools were forced to relocate, evacuate, or close. In Shanghai the girls were forced to stop, get out of their sedan chairs and bow to Japanese soldiers, and to avoid places where they were vulnerable to rape by the Japanese. The strongest identifier in their conceptions of citizenship was their belief in their national identity and a fierce loyalty to China. Progressively the Western powers were identified as part of the problems facing China's modernisation. One critical event in the girls' memory was the rape of a Chinese girl by an American soldier in 1942. For many this was a turning point in their attitude to the West. For some woman, particularly those who remained in the Peoples' Republic of China after 1949, belief in the Christian social gospel translated into political action, as some joined the Chinese Communist Party, some to fight with the Red Army, and others to work for the new PRC. They spoke frankly of their view that a true commitment to the tenets of social Christianity led them to identify with the goals of Communism. This is not a passage that has been well understood or researched by missionary historians. Jennifer Bond's book makes an important contribution to missionary histories, to studies of the growth of twentieth-century nationalism in non-Western societies, and the role women played in forming the new world. She allows Chinese women to speak for themselves, and their stories are sharp and clear and deserve to remain on the record. Beyond the dreams of becoming New Women, these stories tell of the lived experience of missionary education in all of its contradictions.