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- Title
Piety, Professionalism and Power: Chinese Protestant Missionary Physicians and Imperial Affiliations between Women in the Early Twentieth Century.
- Authors
Pripas‐Kapit, Sarah
- Abstract
Through examining the lives and public representations of three Christian Chinese women educated in medicine in the United States, this article analyses the operations of transnational Protestant women’s missionary networks as a gendered form of imperialism and as a means by which a diverse range of women formulated alternatives to heteronormative family arrangements. These networks enabled personal and professional relationships between Chinese women and white women in the US, leading to educational and occupational opportunities for women on both sides of the encounters. The physicians, whose religious and professional identities included a proto-feminist consciousness, embraced missionary affiliations as an alternative to Confucian marriage. However, medical missionary activities also featured inequalities and hierarchies of workers based on race, occupation and place of education. Moreover, the physicians’ religious affiliations could appear to non-Christians as complicity in foreign imperialism, regardless of the women’s professed nationalist aims. Over the course of their transnational lives, these three physicians confronted a social context that included anti-Chinese racism in the US, the growth of nationalism in China and popular anti-imperial sentiments amid political turmoil after the 1911 Revolution. In responding to this context, the physicians cultivated complex self-representations in which their gender, religious, racial, national and occupational identities interacted, sometimes in unexpected ways.
- Subjects
CHINA; CHRISTIAN missions; WOMEN physicians; CHINESE women; WOMAN'S Medical College of Pennsylvania; CHINESE students in foreign countries; HU King Eng; LI Bi Cu; TSAO Liyuin; TWENTIETH century; HISTORY; WOMEN'S history
- Publication
Gender & History, 2015, Vol 27, Issue 2, p349
- ISSN
0953-5233
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/1468-0424.12129