The Woman’s Messenger

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, China underwent tumultuous times—from nation building and the New Culture Movement to the Japanese occupation and the renunciations accompanying the Korean War. As Yun Zhou argues, this transformative period cannot be fully understood without considering the evolving role of women and Christianity in Chinese society.

At the turn of the twentieth century, American missionary women established Nü duo (The Woman’s Messenger), a Christian women’s magazine based in Shanghai whose publication spanned four decades of changing values around feminine virtue. Tracing the magazine’s evolution across its three editors, Zhou shows how growing intellectualism among the magazine’s staff and readership challenged a homogenous ideal of womanhood. While Nü duo began under the editorship of a white American missionary championing traditional domestic values, the Chinese editors who went on to lead the magazine in subsequent decades broadened the boundaries of Christian gender ethics, emphasizing matters of indigenous agency, leftist thinking, theodicy, and personal spiritual elevation. Zhou shows how the magazine’s trajectory points to a subtle yet profound process wherein the women involved—navigating ideas concerning God, gender, nation, warfare, and even the details of everyday life—became agents of historical change rather than mere recipients of it.

Drawing from a wide range of sources from China and the West, this book makes an important contribution to the fields of women’s studies, print culture, modern Chinese history, and world Christianity.