"How I Am Brought into the Light": Representations of Childhood by Missionary Schoolgirls in East China, 1917–1930

Abstract:This article explores how missionary-educated Chinese schoolgirls applied childhood pedagogy that they learned at school to what they perceived to be the pressing demands of Chinese nationalism in the early twentieth century. Although there have been many studies of Christian schools in China from the missionary perspective, we know much less about how Chinese women themselves made sense of the education they received at missionary schools. Based on a study of two elite mission schools for girls in Republican-era East China, this article explores how girls applied child-rearing practices, hygiene, and domestic education to the children whom they taught in the vicinities of their schools. Like their missionary educators before them, they carved out new roles for themselves by claiming authority to speak for a downtrodden "other": Chinese children. In doing so, missionary schoolgirls created new knowledge about Chinese childhood in the early twentieth century.