New Book Published

Women have played an important role in Chinese Christianity. Single women missionaries and missionary spouses, women in religious orders, Chinese Christian women, bible women, nurses, doctors, teachers, and evangelists of all kinds made immense contributions not only to the Christian church but also to social movements such as the anti-footbinding movement, the anti-muitsai movement, the women’s education movement, the ecumenical movement and the temperance movement. In short, women were full participants of the reconstruction of the new Chinese nation and Chinese modernity. Unfortunately, Christian women, like the women revolutionaries who made incredible contributions to the national revolutions of 1911 and 1949, were forgotten in the succeeding history of New China. Historical records of Christian women in modern China remain scarce and fragmented. There are only a few volumes devoted to the subject and these are mostly confined to women’s education and women’s ministry. As interest in the Chinese church has grown over the last decades, there is room for further exploration of the history of women in Chinese Christianity, or alternately, Christian women in Chinese history in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The missionaries came into close contacts with Chinese women. “Women’s work for women” was the call of the day and there were obviously a good number of women from overseas and from China itself taking part in this work. Anglican and Episcopal women missionaries pioneered in many intercultural exchanges, and, in the twentieth century, Chinese Anglican women assumed important positions in church and society. Beyond the world’s expectation, Bishop R. O. Hall ordained the first Anglican woman priest, Florence Li, in 1944, and the Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui became involved in the first debate on women’s ordination.

This book is concerned with women’s history within a specific tradition and locality, that is, Anglican women in Chinese Christianity. It is the first book in our series published in Chinese. Our perspective is interdisciplinary and cross-cultural to return the color and the diversity to the picture of women in ministry and in local churches at a time when they were not expected to make any major achievements to society. There are 9 papers in this volume with the following four parts: 

  1. Women’s participation in Anglican evangelism

  2. Anglican women in Chinese education;

  3. Women’s ordination and ministry in the Church; and 

  4. Anglican women’s participation in politics and society; 

We hope that this book will fill in a gap on the role of women and Christianity in Chinese history.