Redemption and Revolution: American and Chinese New Women in the Early Twentieth Century

By Motoe Sasaki

In the early twentieth century, a good number of college-educated Protestant American women went abroad by taking up missionary careers in teaching, nursing, and medicine. Most often, their destination was China, which became a major mission field for the U.S. Protestant missionary movement as the United States emerged to become an imperial power. These missionary women formed a cohort of new women who sought to be liberated from traditional gender roles. As educators and benevolent emancipators, they attempted to transform Chinese women into self-sufficient middle-class professional women just like themselves. As Motoe Sasaki shows in Redemption and Revolution, these aspirations ran parallel to and were in conflict with those of the Chinese xin nüxing (New Women) they encountered.

The subjectivity of the New Woman was an element of global modernity expressing gendered visions of progress. At the same time it was closely intertwined with the view of historical progress in the nation. Though American and Chinese New Women emphasized individual autonomy in that each sought to act as historical agents for modern progress, their notions of subjectivity were in different ways linked to the ideologies of historical progress of their nations. Sasaki’s transnational history of these New Women explores the intersections of gender, modernity, and national identity within the politics of world history, where the nation-state increased its presence as a universal unit in an ever-interconnecting global context.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Oct 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781501706813

Motoe Sasaki

Motoe Sasaki is Associate Professor on the Faculty of Intercultural Communication at Hosei University.

Book preview

REDEMPTION AND REVOLUTION

American and Chinese New Women in the Early Twentieth Century

Motoe Sasaki

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The New Woman and World History

1. New Women in the Civilizing Mission

2. Science as the Key to Modern Progress

3. United States Internationalism and Chinese Modernity

4. Awash in the Storm of National Revolution

5. Divergent Paths of Historical Progress

Epilogue: Lost in the Paradigm of World History

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Writing a book is often compared to a journey. The life of this book, from inception to completion, has very much been a kind of journey for me. Over the course of writing, I have lived in four different countries and have incurred tremendous debt to a wide variety of individuals and institutions. I began this project in the history department of the Johns Hopkins University. From the initial stages of this project until its completion, Dorothy Ross and Paul Kramer offered me insightful guidance and advice. Without their long-standing support and encouragement, this book would not have been possible. I am also greatly indebted to Judith Walkowitz and Tobie Meyer-Fong, who not only generously offered valuable scholarly comments and suggestions but also inspired me to become a female, professional academic.

I feel fortunate to have been affiliated with the gender studies division at the Australian National University when I was writing this book, and I am particularly grateful to Tamara Jacka, Margaret Jolly, and Rosanne Kennedy for their many stimulating ideas and suggestions. I also had the privilege of spending time with China scholars at Leiden University in the Netherlands. I am especially grateful to Francesca Del Lago for her confidence in the potential of this book project.

Like all historians, I received kind support and assistance from librarians and archivists. This book has been made possible by the helpful staff and access to archival records at the Yale Divinity School Library, the Rockefeller Archives Center, the World YWCA Archives in Geneva, the YWCA of the U.S.A., the Presbyterian Historical Society Archives, the Burke Library of Union Theological Seminary, the Yale University Sterling Memorial Library, the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, the Wellesley College Archives, the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division at the New York Public Library, and the Cornell Medical Center Archives. I am also indebted to the anonymous readers of Cornell University Press for their helpful comments and suggestions. I thank Michael McGandy, who guided me patiently through the publishing process.

I must also thank the following friends at Osaka University, the Johns Hopkins University, the Australian National University, and Leiden University for their support: Tim Amos, Anna Beerens, Mary Kilcline-Cody, Amy Feng, Guo Hui, Guo Jie, Kyoko Matsukawa, Hiroko Matsuda, Kyoung-hee Moon, Bradley and Camelia Naranch, Saeyoung Park, Sachiko Tanuma, Lucy Tatman, and Vanessa Ward. I also thank Kei Tanaka, Mari Yoshihara, Junji Koizumi, Satoshi Nakagawa, Naoki Kasuga, and my current colleagues at Hosei University in Tokyo.

My parents and sister, Toshihide, Mutsuko, and Kaori Sasaki, and my in-laws, the late Edwin Gayle and Emily Gayle, deserve special thanks for their moral support. My last, and greatest, debt of gratitude is to my husband, Curtis Anderson Gayle, who continuously encourages and supports me with his great wit and humor.

Map 1. The China Treaty Ports

Introduction

The New Woman and World History

In an 1898 article entitled The New Woman,¹ Lucy W. Waterbury, secretary of the Baptist Foreign Mission Society for the East, boldly declared, The new woman in mission is imperatively needed. In this article, which she actually wrote as part of a vigorous recruitment campaign for new missionary candidates, Waterbury insisted that the new woman, who was educated, dainty, [and] refined and thus a hallmark of an advanced civilization, was in fact a promising liberator for the barbarous woman of pagan lands. Relying on this central idea of the New Woman as a liberator and a civilizing influence, she maintained that the new woman in Christ Jesus sees wonderful possibility in humanity; . . . [through] strengthening and influencing women who were living in far-off lands.²

By the beginning of the twentieth century, a good number of New Women, many of whom were college-educated and self-sufficient professionals, accepted this very challenge of the new woman in Christ Jesus and took up missionary careers in fields such as teaching, nursing, and medicine, and one after another set sail for points overseas where they could realize these dreams.³ The keen interest displayed by New Women missionaries in the attempts to salvage and emancipate women in far-flung countries was, as the rhetoric employed in Waterbury’s recruitment appeal suggests, rooted in a sense of moral obligation on the part of women from a historically advanced country to bring their sisters from a less historically advanced country out of darkness and into modernity. This emancipatory spirit, moreover, reveals New Women missionaries’ self-awareness as highly educated professional women and as members of a powerful, advanced, and enlightened nation that was fully entitled to conduct and lead such a civilizing mission.

The same year that Waterbury was soliciting New Women missionaries, the United States entered the ranks of imperial powers by acquiring an overseas empire as a result of the Spanish-Cuban-American War (1898).⁴ Buoyed by this historic development, the United States proclaimed an Open Door policy toward China, demanding that other imperial powers halt the scramble for territories and trying to ensure equal opportunity for the United States to expand its sphere of interest in China. The new reality of the United States as an imperial power also produced a new self-recognition and confidence among Americans that the country was now on an equal footing with European nations: It was not only sufficiently competent to tutor the uncivilized others but also superior enough to win the struggle for survival in an increasingly competitive world. This kind of awareness about the growing presence of the United States in the world became an important motivating factor for New Women missionaries to take part in the U.S. foreign mission movement.

During the early twentieth century the major destination for American New Women missionaries was China⁵—a vital new frontier for the United States to conquer in the cause of expanding its sphere of influence beyond the continental borders into the Asia-Pacific region. Before landing in China, most American New Women missionaries assumed that China was a virgin land waiting to be cultivated and that Chinese women were also waiting to be uplifted into modernity. Consequently, they never imagined that there was a modern female subjectivity in China equivalent to their own. To their surprise, however, American New Women missionaries were to witness the emergence of the New Woman in their mission fields. One such missionary who was sent to China reported, in 1909, that the ‘new woman’ in China has appeared.⁶

Behind this development was a growing sense of urgency and anxiety about the nation’s future among Chinese intellectuals, reformers, and revolutionaries. Since China’s defeat in the Opium War, its territorial integrity had been undermined by Western powers. The Qing government’s long-standing inability to work out effective measures to ameliorate the situation was conclusively brought to light by defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and the subsequent suppression of the Boxer Uprising by foreign troops (1899–1901). In the face of a grave and perilous situation, Chinese intellectuals, reformers, and revolutionaries worried that China had entered a period of wangguo (the loss of the state), which traditionally meant a change of dynasties but now gained a new connotation—national subjugation, or the condition of being colonized by foreign powers.⁷ Painfully awakened by the reality of China’s weakness, they began to analyze their country’s historical reality from a global perspective chiefly articulated through evolutionary ideas, which had caught the attention of the Chinese public at the time, in the hope of finding fundamental measures to save it.⁸ According to this view, the historical progress of a country, which was increasingly conceived within the linear progress of world history, was largely contingent upon the process of evolution. There was an important role for human progress in the equation: the key to the process of developing a modern society was human ingenuity, which would make it possible for a country like China to live through a social Darwinian jungle of competition. In this respect, those who were concerned about the future of China thought it crucial to develop a modern sense of independent personhood among Chinese so that they could help turn China into a strong nation-state. As part of this effort some Chinese, mostly men, began to advocate and promote a new subject position for Chinese women, namely, the New Woman, or xin nüxing—a modern independent and contributing female citizen who was unshackled and free from feudal bondage. Accordingly, the promotion of women’s education, as one such example of social development, was earnestly undertaken in China.

When New Women missionaries came to China, they encountered these xin nüxing and, initially, the relationship between the two sides was one of mentor and pupil by virtue of the fact that the former were at a more advanced stage of historical progress than the latter. On such terms, American New Women missionaries stood as a kind of living role model for Chinese xin nüxing. This amicable and yet hierarchical relationship, however, eventually dissolved as the realities surrounding both sides changed, and subsequently the implications of the New Woman as a historical agency for modern progress became less supported in both the United States and China. The transformation of the relationship as well as the significance of the two sides of New Women was contingent on the shifting views of historical progress in both countries, in which the various elements of modernity, including the subjectivity of the New Woman, were integrated and contested.

The subjectivity of the New Woman placed considerable importance on the essentiality of individual autonomy and self-determination. In this sense, it was closely associated with the projects of Enlightenment liberalism. According to Elizabeth Povinelli, Enlightenment liberalism was not a thing but a moving target developed in the European empire and served as a normative horizon for spreading democracy and capitalism globally.⁹ The New Woman was, one could argue, a quintessential embodiment of Enlightenment liberalism, intricately intertwined with the enterprises of spreading modernity for the purpose of expanding the sphere of interest of the Western powers in the world.¹⁰

American New Women missionaries, as an example of the New Woman of the day, took on the task of propagating modernity through what Ryan Dunch calls the significant intermediaries in the construction of global modernity in its universalizing dimension.¹¹ They attempted to create New Women like themselves in China on the basis of the ideal of individual autonomy and self-determination. To attain this goal, they introduced various elements of cutting-edge U.S. modernity, ranging from science and democracy to internationalism, as an omnipotent force not unlike God itself. They thought that this kind of modernity would liberate Chinese women from old, feudal constraints. Yet, as Arif Dirlik rightly puts it, modernity was no doubt not just a European [and American] thing but the product of multifaceted interactions that involved many societies.¹² In China, many Chinese men and women did undertake serious efforts to create xin nüxing by utilizing examples of the New Woman from various countries.¹³ It was in this context that American New Women missionaries became a tangible model for young female Chinese.

The issue of imperialism and its threat to China’s national independence did, however, stand in the way of the efforts of the two sides of New Women to build an affirmative relationship. Imperialism apparently undermined the right to self-determination of the Chinese people. Hence, it drastically opposed the tenets of American New Women missionaries, who adhered to the notion of autonomy and self-determination. Yet, as Uday Mehta agues, imperialism was not totally contradictory to the ideas of Enlightenment liberalism but rather grew out of them, so long as it sought to bring freedom and progress to the uncivilized people based on the universal vision of historical progress. In this sense, imperialism was very much a part of global modernity grounded on the assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism about reason and historical progress.¹⁴ We might add that socialism, which China utilized to counter the threat posed by imperialism, was neither an ‘alternative’ path of historical progress nor a third way attained by the sublation (aufheben) of the dichotomy between the Euro-American-centric vision of liberal historical progress and the traditional indigenous resistance to it. On the contrary, it was, as the experiences of American and Chinese New Women reveal, along with the projects of imperialism, a product of singular global modernity grounded on Enlightenment liberalism.¹⁵ In addition, both imperialism and socialism operated within the increasingly influential paradigm of world history, a framework within which the burgeoning global system of nation-states gained currency. Likewise, as a part of global modernity, the subject positions of both American New Women missionaries and Chinese xin nüxing students were locked into this paradigm and implicated in the evolution of the visions of historical progress in various countries.

This book traces the experiences of American New Women missionaries who went to China during the early twentieth century in order to uplift and modernize young Chinese women. By examining the transformations in the significance of American New Women missionaries’ enterprises in China, it will show that views of historical progress on both sides of the Pacific were central to the formation and reformation of the subjectivities of New Women, American and Chinese alike. Views of historical progress were also linked to changes associated with the rhetoric of U.S. expansionism and the principles of the U.S. foreign mission movement as well as the rise of modernization and anti-imperialist movements in China, all of which were intricately intertwined with the idea of world history as world judgment. With this in mind, the book takes the position that the New Woman, which has been researched in various fields as an icon of modernity, was also a source of agency tightly entangled with the competition for survival and the idea of historical progress in an age in which modernity was being adopted and incorporated in non-Western countries such as China.¹⁶ Consequently, the rationale for the existence of enterprises undertaken by American New Women missionaries and their relationship with Chinese New Women was contingent on the fluid relations and perceptions between the United States and China, which were shaped, negotiated, and contested within the paradigm of Hegelian variants of world history.¹⁷

This operative paradigm of world history, to be precise, was a kind of hierarchical imaginative mapping system of the world that delineated and shaded the interaction between the United States and China on a global grid. It was essentially based on an evolutionary view of the historical development of human liberty, which placed European civilization and its civil society at the culminating stage of world history. It put Asia in the very initial stages and excluded Africa from any historical part of the world.¹⁸ It also relegated America—while realizing that the New World was the land of the future—to a place that was nevertheless outside the purview of world history. This idea of world history was, in other words, a device for converting contemporaneous global space into images of others in a world divided by regions and countries, all sorted neatly into different stages of historical development. Both the United States and China stood, moreover, on the fringes of this classification scheme of the world until the latter part of the nineteenth century. In the face of growing global interconnectedness and competitiveness within the modern capitalist world-system, however, the United States and China sought entry into the paradigm of world history to negotiate their places in the hierarchical imaginative global map.

Within the United States, the urge to locate historical progress in world history arose from the desire to reestablish the distinctiveness of the United States by reconfiguring views of the country’s historical trajectory in an age when its historical development appeared to follow and almost mimic that of the Old World.¹⁹ The attempt began with a diffusionist explanation about the origins of the United States through Teutonic germ theory. This theory held that American democratic and liberal institutions had grown out of an institutional germ first spawned in the forests of Germany and then transported to Britain by the Teutonic tribes and finally carried into the New World by descendants of the Teutons.²⁰ By the early 1890s, however, the Teutonic-origins doctrine began to lose much of its credibility. In its place, Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, an alternative evolutionary explanation, gained currency.²¹ This idea shifted the focus of the evolutionary view of U.S. progress from the westward transatlantic diffusion of democratic institutions to the westward transcontinental civilizing process. In Turner’s view, a civilizing process (marked by progress from a primitive to a civilized stage) was conceived as a series of cultural and economic contact on the frontiers. The civilizing process in the United States was believed to take place by breaking the bonds of the past in frontier areas and integrating the development of these frontier areas into U.S. history.²² The territorial expansion of the United States was thus understood within the framework of social evolution. On the basis of the evolutionary view of historical progress, which was compatible with the spatial and teleological notion of the westward movement of world history mapped out earlier by Hegel and others, the United States embarked on a full-scale entry into the civilizing mission in the Asia-Pacific region, a new frontier for the United States.

In contrast, China’s urge to locate historical progress in world history was born out of a sense of crisis about the real possibility of wangguo, or national subjugation. Among the challenges China had to confront was Hegel’s ominous prediction that it, like India, would one day succumb to the necessary fate of Asiatic empires and become subject to European powers. The ground on which this bleak assessment was drawn was the diagnosis that China, along with India, was historically stagnant and remained outside world history.²³ In addition to this dismal prospect for China’s future, a closely related challenge many Chinese sought to take on was the influence of what Edward Said refers to as imaginative geography, or world history’s mapping scheme, in which uneven global development was articulated and visualized in terms of hierarchical images of others.²⁴ In this rendition, China was a bumbling and feeble backwater and would provide Euro-American and Japanese imperial powers with the perfect pretext for bringing it under their tutelage to reorganize and modernize it. Chinese intellectuals, reformers, and revolutionaries, as noted above, searched for ways to empower their nation by incorporating various elements of modernity, including the New Woman, as a means to thwart the designs of imperial powers.

The United States was also aware that imaginative geography could bring with it serious repercussions to their foreign relations. On the whole, the production and circulation of this psychospatial imaginary mapping of the world was done by a handful of Westerners, including Americans, who could afford long-distance travel and/or had expertise in exotic foreign lands.²⁵ Yet, with the increase in the flow of people and information across national borders, imaginative geography began to go beyond the monopoly of a privileged few. The popularization of imaginative geography, in other words, gradually wielded a measurable influence on narratives and images of a country, making them less static and more susceptible to current world affairs. Given this situation, the United States began paying closer attention to the global effects of how it was being imaged and represented across the world. It also placed more emphasis on putting forward the (self) image of a benevolent liberator who intended to help less advanced countries like China and transform them into modern, independent nation-states.²⁶ In so doing, the United States, though now a genuine imperial power, attempted to create the impression that, unlike European and Japanese imperial powers, it was a fair and magnanimous country that did not seek to subjugate or exploit other nations.

The U.S. Protestant foreign mission movement played an active and crucial role in shaping the country’s image amid an increasingly interconnected and competitive domain of global imagery among various countries. It originally started with the establishment of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in 1810.²⁷ Under the leadership of Rufus Anderson, the foreign mission movement focused on preaching the Gospel and kept a comfortable distance from secular activities.²⁸ After the Civil War, however, it redirected the focus of its activities by following the lead of mission movements among European imperial powers, most notably Great Britain.²⁹ With the rise of a new spirit in the mission movement, epitomized in the Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong’s view of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization, imperialism and Christianity were united in the guise of the Anglo-Saxon imperial civilizing mission.³⁰ The prime mover within this new stream of the U.S. foreign mission movement was the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM), founded in 1888 under the slogan the evangelization of the world in this generation.³¹ In the late nineteenth century, as the United States became a bona fide imperial power, its foreign mission movement, galvanized by the SVM, expanded its activities in Asia, particularly in China, grounded on the Anglo-Saxon bond between both English-speaking empires.³² In so doing, the movement sought to present a picture of the U.S. civilizing mission in ways that paralleled that of the British.³³

In the wake of this new development in the foreign mission movement, college-educated American New Women began affirmatively enlisting in mission work, and many were dispatched to China. As in the case of their male counterparts, these women shared the sense and purpose of an imperial civilizing mission, underpinned by evolutionary ideas of civilizational progress. They were, accordingly, in tune with what Antoinette Burton has called imperial feminism. The latter emerged in organized British middle-class women’s movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and enabled American New Women missionaries to take on the role of emancipators of women shackled in China’s feudal social and cultural structure through their recourse to the fundamental premise of a universal female ‘we.’³⁴ Gradually, however, the key objective of American New Women missionaries’ work shifted, in tandem with changes occurring in the U.S. foreign mission movement, from uplifting their less civilizationally advanced Chinese sisters to modernizing Chinese women so that they might eventually emulate American women.

By the 1910s, furthermore, the U.S. foreign mission movement took a new direction and began proactively propagating U.S. liberal tenets of democracy and freedom, in conjunction with the rise of Wilsonian internationalism.³⁵ Given this situation, the popularity among missionaries of Anglo-Saxon unity between the United States and Great Britain faded away.³⁶ In its place, the U.S. mission foreign movement increased its push toward unilateralism by placing internationalism at the center of its activities. For instance, John R. Mott, a prominent leader of the movement, proudly reported that missionaries had earnestly committed themselves to preaching the gospel of internationalism as ambassadors, interpreters, and mediators in the most vital aspects of international and inter-racial relationships.³⁷

One significant element for the increasingly influential idea of internationalism within the foreign mission movement was the burgeoning notion of science as a global lingua franca beyond national and cultural boundaries and as a neutral and egalitarian tool for promoting modern progress.³⁸ This ultimately democratic notion of science—as a kind of omnipotent God able to impartially modernize and improve the entire world—shored up the development of the spirit of internationalism in the U.S. foreign mission movement. To this extent, one could argue that what David A. Hollinger has called the intellectual gospel, which emerged in the late nineteenth century as the belief that conduct in accord with the ethic of science could be religiously fulfilling, a form of ‘justification,’ had a significant impact on the movement.³⁹ In fact, along with the social gospel, which attempted to reform social structures by implementing religious values, the intellectual gospel was an integral part of internationalism within the movement. Moreover, the intellectual gospel firmed up links between the ideals of U.S. democracy and internationalism within the foreign mission movement; this linkage ultimately helped bring into relief the distinction between the United States and other imperial powers in the domain of global imagery among various countries.

A new generation of American New Women missionaries, who came of age by inhaling the spirit of internationalism of the day, entered mission fields from the late 1910s with the hope of spreading the gospel of internationalism. In China, they felt a sense of exaltation when they discovered a favorable image of the United States among many Chinese people, which culminated in what Erez Manela has called the Wilsonian moment—in which President Woodrow Wilson was hailed in the colonized world, including China, as a symbol of a just international society founded on the principle of self-determination.⁴⁰ For American New Women missionaries this positive rendition of the U.S. national spirit meant they could be seen as benevolent emancipators of women in colonized countries like China. Therefore, they were bewildered when they witnessed their country being treated as one of many imperialist powers in China during the National Revolution and the anti-Christian movement of the mid-1920s. After the collapse of the Wilsonian movement, accordingly, U.S. missionaries including New Women missionaries drew a clearer line between U.S. liberal internationalism and their own particular internationalism, placing more emphasis on elements of the social gospel.⁴¹ Nonetheless, they were never able to recapture the bella figura they had enjoyed previously. In other words, their gospel of internationalism, which was geared toward creating modern, independent Chinese women, was intimately caught up in the uneven and competitive development of global modernity, which operated within the paradigm of world history.

As the following chapters will detail, the enterprises of American New Women missionaries and their relationship with Chinese New Women were entangled in, and subject to, both the growth of the United States as a world power and the rising anti-imperialist movement of national salvation and self-determination in China. That is to say, the subject positions of both American New Women missionaries and Chinese New women were, insofar as each sought to act as historical agents for modern progress, differently but equally locked into the politics of world history where the nation-state increased its presence as a universal unit in an ever-interconnecting global context. By examining the experiences of American New Women missionaries in China, this book elucidates the ways in which the subject position of women in the modern era was intricately linked to relations between views of historical progress in the nation and an expanding global modernity and, moreover, how such internal and global relations were mutually interdependent and also gendered.

The chapters that follow are organized chronologically to illustrate how views of historical progress in the United States and China, which were shaped and reshaped through negotiations on the terrain of the imaginative geography, affected both American New Women missionaries’ enterprises in China and the subjectivity of the New Woman in both countries. Each chapter is also organized thematically to examine how American New Women missionaries interpreted and experienced the creeds of the U.S. foreign mission movement, including the evolutionary-laden notion of civilization, the universally applicable and fundamentally egalitarian notion of science, and the essentially democratic and cross-cultural notion of internationalism. The chapters will also explore how these missionaries’ interactions with Chinese xin nüxing, with their male counterparts from the United States, and with Chinese male intellectuals and revolutionaries, impinged on their perceptions and practices of these gospels of U.S. global modernity.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the social-evolutionary discourse on civilization was an overarching framework for determining the civilizational level of races, peoples, and countries. Chapter