Description
Book SynopsisIn late Qing and early Republican China, new opportunities emerged for Chinese women. Xia Shi unearths the history of how married nonprofessional women without modern educations moved out of their sequestered domestic life, engaged in charitable, philanthropic, and religious activities, and repositioned themselves as public actors.
Trade ReviewWhile there are many formidable works of history focused upon iconoclastic and progressively educated 'new women,' there are far fewer that address the political and progressive lives of so-called 'home' women such as those featured in Xia Shi's work. By situating individual figures within their broader social and familial contexts, and in shifting contexts of work and leisure, Shi masterfully reveals the complex economic, social, and political webs that defined these women's progressive activities. -- Thomas Mullaney, Stanford University
Whether singing and dancing by female government students while selling handicrafts to support flood relief in late Qing Beijing or moving exhortations by Zhu Qihui (a.k.a. Mme Xiong Xiling) that extracted large sums of money from warlords and skeptical literati for the Mass Education Movement, philanthropic work by Chinese women in early twentieth-century China captured the public imagination, challenged gender ideals, and delivered charity to those in need. Xia Shi demonstrates in compelling detail that female philanthropists embraced contemporary social needs to expand their moral purview and the realm of their licit social space beyond the personal and family to encompass the nation and society as a whole. In so doing, they expanded notions of citizenship and its obligations for women and men alike. -- Peter Carroll, Northwestern University
This book brings the stories of a number of fascinating women to light and highlights their connections to broader developments in modern Chinese history. Xia Shi adds nuance and layers of understanding to our existing sense of the late Qing and Republican periods. -- Joan Judge, York University
A pioneering work on Chinese
jiating funü with a particular focus on their involvement in charities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. -- Hanchao Lu * The China Quarterly *
A valuable contribution to women's history. * Choice *
Xia Shi’s study is a timely reminder to gender historians of modern China that it was not only modern educated ‘new women’ or female reformers and revolutionaries who began to make their presence felt in the urban public sphere during the early decades of the twentieth century, and that a focus on the unheralded domain of philanthropy and charity brings to light the contributions made by older, domestically-oriented married women at this time to cultural and social transformations. * Nan Nü *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Elite Women and Charity1. Beyond a Personal Virtue
2. Being Female Philanthropists
Part II. The YWCA in China and “Women in the Home”3. Reaching Out to Women in the Home
4. Women Interacting with the YWCA
Part III. Women in the School of the Way5. Redefining Confucian Gender Doctrines
6. Women, Superstition, and the Reorientation Toward Charity
Epilogue
Notes
Glossary
Works Cited
Index
