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Works by Gael Graham

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This book is an analysis of female missionaries in China and their impact on gender issues. Graham sees that female missionaries carried their gender roles with them to China. She believes that female missionaries were actively trying to improve the status of women, but faced very strong resistance from Chinese who saw the missionaries as undermining traditional Confucian society. She examines a wide variety of women’s issues in China but focuses primarily on education. She argues that a primary purpose of establishing schools for girls was to raise their perceived value in society, although she accepts that the girls’ education was largely designed around American ideas of domesticity. The purpose of the schools is a difficult sell. Graham does not discuss the importance of creating a literate population for conversion to Christianity, which is often ascribes as the primary motivation for missionary schools. Graham does not discuss the issue thoroughly nor does she provide enough support to make that aspect of her argument convincing.

Whatever the motivation for the establishment of missionary schools, Graham extends her education policy to her treatment of the anti-footbinding movement. She believes that admission policy (meaning not accepting girls with bound feet) was an important tool as early as 1872. The progress of the policy was gradual, spreading to more and more schools until it was accepted by almost all missionary schools in the 1890’s and finally becoming universal when the Chinese government established schools for girls in 1907. In this aspect, Graham places a higher value on schools exclusionary admission policies than most other historians. She believes that it played an effective role in deterring footbinding from its inception, while most others believe it had only a marginal impact. Graham relies on missionary publications and correspondence by missionaries as well as school records. As such, she is not in a position to really assess the effects of the policy.

Footbinding was slow to die, especially in the interior of the country, so remote missionary schools continued to admit girls with bound feet at least into the 1920’s. Graham discusses how missionaries tried to get to women to unbind their feet once in school. They faced a difficult task. “Although the bound-footed girls hate to unbind, I think the large-footed ones never regret their comfortable state with the added liberty and fun they can have. They do love to play basketball.” Graham does not develop the connection between footbinding and physical education, only mentioning it as a minor point.
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Scapegoats | Jan 1, 2008 |

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