Christianity and gender in South-East China : the chaozhou missions (1849-1949)

Abstract

Four missions, namely the American

Baptist Mission (ABM), the English Presbyterian Mission (EPM), the

Basel Mission and les Missions Etrangères de Paris (MEP) carried out the

evangelical work among the Hoklo people in the mid-nineteenth century. By using the archives and tracts of these missions and adopting the perspective of contextualization and the comparative methodology, this study examines how Christianity changed the daily lives of the local Christian women and the traditional gender patterns in Chaozhou in the late Qing and Republic period. This study highlights the life experience of these Catholic and Protestant women, their active personal agency, and their ability to create autonomous economic, social, and religious spaces for themselves. It goes beyond the dichotomy of empowerment and resistance in the conventional feminist scholarship and represents a new trend of research, moving away from the mod ernist and feminist discourses of historical analysis and reclaiming proper historical perspectives of these humble women.