American Women Missionaries In China:a Cultural Exchange Event

American women missionaries had played a vital role in evangelizing the world outside of their domesticities after the end of the American Civil War. Starting in Cent Societies and Church since 1810s, American women began to engage in missionary foreign movement. With the establishment of American Women’s Boards in the second half of the 19th century, women missionaries got more opportunities to conduct Christian work overseas. The number of women missionaries, both married and single, had accounted for 60 percent of the total population of the mission force at that time.Despite missionaries’claims of spreading evangelism and Christianity, scholars who study on the missionary foreign movement usually research into this issue within the framework of cultural imperialism, namely they have been arguing whether these missionaries were cultural imperialists or not. Many studies in this field have concluded that they were the agents who carried out cultural imperialism upon their host nations. Different from these scholars who maintain the opinion that these missionaries were cultural imperialists, some researchers state that the missionary foreign movement wasn’t related to cultural imperialism. Besides, cultural imperialism alone has many limitations as an explanation to address the missionary foreign movement in many aspects. Simply saying whether the missionary foreign movement had the nature of cultural imperialism or not would restrict our visions to only loss, ethnocentricity, and racial superiority. Thus more perspectives are needed to study on this issue. The previous studies primarily focus on the positive influence this missionary foreign movement brought to hosted nations, and few concentrate on the positive influence of this movement. This thesis delves into a cultural exchange perspective of American women’s China mission under the nature of cultural imperialism. Even though the positive influences from this perspective are critical, the negative influence could not be neglected as well. It not only studies on influence exerted on Chinese women by these women missionaries, but also attaches attention to the reverse influence exerted on these American women missionaries by either Chinese women or Chinese social environment.This thesis probes into the evangelical, educational, and medical causes established by American women missionaries for Chinese women around the turn of the twentieth century to illustrate how American women missionaries exerted an impact on Chinese women. In addition to that, this study also researches into the reverse influence this China mission had exerted on American women’s work and life to endorse the cultural exchange framework. On one hand, American women missionaries had brought modernity to their Chinese sisters by promoting these three causes in China. Under the dedication and influence of American women missionaries, Chinese women began to realize their values to society, and they embarked on undertaking social responsibilities and making contributions to society as an independent force. However in the mean time, American women missionaries also brought about some bad influence by establishing a domestic racial hierarchy with them at the top and the Chinese they hired at the bottom. On the other hand, Chinese women and the social context exerted an impact on American women missionaries as well. These women missionaries had not only adapted themselves to China’s unique social context, but also adjusted their evangelical strategies based on Chinese traditions. Additionally, this China mission reached its influence even back to women who were in the United States. So from this cultural exchange perspective, we could generalize some positive influence of this American missionary foreign movement. However, no matter what kinds of positive influences it brought to hosted nations, its imperialistic nature couldn’t be changed and its negative influence wouldn’t be erased.