Efecto estimado en los estados financieros por el IASB

This chapter has examined the historical context of Nü duo. The growth of the print media and changing attitudes toward gender in the late Qing period gave rise to debate on the role of women in Chinese society. Western Christian concepts of “ideal womanhood,” promoted especially by foreign missionaries, became entwined with intellectual discussions on China’s modernisation and found expression in popular periodicals such as Nü duo. However, compared with the non-Christian intelligentsia, the Christian community in China led by foreign missionaries at this time, was driven less by the desire to strengthen China and more by a religious zeal to convert China to Christianity. Various reasons such as political restrictions and different evangelical strategies had resulted in mission activities that had introduced Western knowledge. A surge in the publication of secular woman’s magazines during this period convinced Laura White of the necessity of a Chinese Christian magazine. Her enthusiasm was fuelled by the growing number of Western female missionaries who worked primarily in mission schools, as well as being encouraged by the success of her own published works.

An exploration of the establishment of Nü duo highlights the leading role played by Western missionaries in financing, designing and circulating the magazine. Their collective efforts in producing it indicate that the Christian ideals promoted in it were representative of the missionary’s vision of an “ideal womanhood.” The fact that this vision largely influenced students in mission schools is evidenced by the subject matter of its early Chinese contributors. The following chapter examines this process in detail showing that Laura White set the tone for Nü duo, and that Chinese student contributors were, initially, receptive to their Western mentor.

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Chapter 3 Adapting Victorian Domesticity: 1912–1915

Laura White’s House in Shanghai

Mary Ninde Gamewell, “A Day at Joyfield,” Woman’s Missionary Friend (June 1918): 194. …periodical which should go regularly into the homes, with not only good, clean fiction through which truth might be taught, but also instruction in hygiene, child-training, economic administration of the home, articles illustrating the beauty of filial piety so dear to the Chinese heart, tales of self-denial of those whose moving impulse has been the love of One who made the great renunciation, a printed messenger that would be sent far beyond where the voice of the missionary could go.

Laura M. White, 1918210 The collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 saw a series of dramatic socio-political transitions during the 1910s and the 1920s. Individuals started to be disengaged from their previous bonds and social obligations found in traditional society, resulting in social and political instability.211 _{This period of} fragmentation, as Mayfair Yang suggests, began at the time of the 1911 Revolution and ended only at the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.212 _{On the other hand, this allowed space for}

210_{The Forty-NinthAnnual Report of the WFMS, 1918 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State Journal Printing Establishment,}

1918), 96.

211 _{Terry Bodenhorn (ed.), Defining Modernity: Guomindang Rhetorics of a New China 1920–1970 (Ann Arbor:}

University of Michigan, 2002), 48.

65 alternative beliefs, values, and ideas for individuals to choose. According to Max Weber, the presence of a diverse set of beliefs and the choice and attitudes these generated, was a hallmark of modernity.213 _{In this sense, the establishment of a popular Christian and Protestant magazine, Nü duo,} directed at educated Chinese women, presented them with choices for a non-traditional life-style perceived as appropriate for the modernisation of Chinese society.

At the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of Western women sailed to China to fulfil their evangelical ambitions, including the American Methodist missionary, Laura M. White (1867–1937), who embarked on her journey to China on 8 October 1891.214 _{White was to become a leading Western} advocate for social change in China through her role as the editor of Nü duo. Articles in Nü duo in the period before the iconoclastic May Fourth period is the focus of this chapter. Their emphasis on the institution of the Chinese family and the need to inculcate Christian values in order to restructure it for the new nation, raises the following questions: What kind of Chinese-Christian family did Nü duo

aim to promote and which aspects did it emphasise? How was an ideal home life promoted for the newly established nation? How did White adapt Christian ideals in vernacular form?

Articles on the family, women, and the nation are singled out as these were the three major recurring themes in Nü duo. A comparative analysis of ideas circulating in non-Christian magazines will be included to see how Nü duo differed from, or agreed with, secular discussions on family reform. By exploring Nü duo under White’s editorship, this chapter will reveal a Victorian notion of domesticity that was congruent with traditional Chinese gender ethics in a way that excluded women from social and political engagement in the nation-building process. The image of the ideal Christian woman portrayed by Nü duo, situated firmly within the restrictive confines of the family home, granted her a limited role in China’s national revival.

213 _{Duara, “Knowledge and Power in the Discourse of Modernity,” 69.} 214 _{“Personal Mention,” Heathen Woman’s Friend (November 1891): 107.}

66 A full appreciation of White’s role requires an examination of her American background and the historical forces which shaped her Christian values. Attention then shifts to China and the specific context of Nü duo and its agenda which addresses the questions raised above and explains why White thought the time was ripe to reach educated Chinese women through journalism.