The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China

Missionaries worked on Chinese gender issues in combating footbinding in China while also dealing with the gender issues they brought with them. Hunter focuses on women missionaries and how they interacted with Chinese society. She uses the correspondence of forty female missionaries to provide a complex examination of women’s roles in American society and its effect on their actions in China. Women were the majority of American missionaries in China at the turn of the century, yet their role in missionary work was usually in support of men, a reflection of their role in America. They were paid less and tended to domestic work and raising children. Their primary role in proselytizing was working with young women since they were given show more more access than men were.

Hunter spends relatively little time on women missionaries in the reform movements. When she does, her emphasis is on the conservative nature of the women’s views. She argues that female missionaries, like most American women, did not regard gender as the core of their identity. They rarely supported women’s rights movements in either the United States or in China. On the specific issue of footbinding, Hunter agrees that missionaries were vocally opposed to the practice, but believes that prior the 1890’s “most missionaries tolerated what they could not change.” She suggests that missionaries did not want to add obstacles to reaching potential Chinese converts, so they commonly admitted women with bound feet to their schools. show less