Description
Book SynopsisBased on extensive oral history interviews, Dreaming the New Woman uncovers the experiences of girls who attended missionary middle schools in Republican China in the first half of the twentieth century. Chinese missionary schoolgirls were often labelled foreign puppets or seen as passive recipients of a western-style education. By focusing on the pupils'' own perspectives and drawing on seventy-five oral history interviews conducted with missionary school alumnae, alongside student writings, missionary reports, and newspaper sources, this fascinating book provides fresh insights into what it meant to be Chinese, female, and Christian during the first half of China''s turbulent twentieth century. The oral history interviews show how missionary schoolgirls weathered periods of anti-Christian hostility, experimented with new gender roles at school, experienced the Second Sino-Japanese War in Shanghai, and applied Christianity to the Communist cause after 1949. Jennifer Bond reveals how p
