Modern missionary work and Chinese women’s literacy: Amy Moore in China 1930–1949

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the early work of the Australian missionary Amy Moore, who worked for the China Inland Mission for twenty years. Moore aimed to develop local Christian women leaders who would contribute to China’s spiritual and moral evolution, under the continuing guidance of the colonialism of the European powers. Moore was critical of much of the colonial interventions of Britain and others, but she did not consider that China had yet reached a state of spiritual and cultural maturity, particularly in its treatment of women. Her plan was to improve adult women’s literacy, combining her evangelical passion with influences from international movements for women’s emancipation, and campaigns to improve the condition of Chinese women. Moore’s work was also framed by international and progressive changes in the world mission movement in the interwar years. At the same time Moore responded to modernising changes within contemporary China. Improvements in health, education, and gendered relations for rural women influenced missionary women’s work. Moore shared many life experiences as young woman with Chinese colleagues and friends, yet always the bonds of affection and emotion were cut through by colonial and racial divides.

KEYWORDS:

• Twentieth-century women missionaries
• China
• Chinese women’s literacy
• China Inland Mission
• social gospel

Amy Weir was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1907, and from her early years committed herself to the life of a missionary. She combined a vision of herself as a modern young woman with a commitment to the spiritual, moral and social reform of China. Weir was trained as a missionary for foreign fields in Melbourne, from 1929 to 1930, and then as Amy Moore, after her marriage in 1934, progressed to become a senior missionary with the China Inland Mission (CIM), until she was forced to evacuate from China with the establishment of the Peoples’ Republic in 1949. Throughout she often acted informally as the leading missionary in a city, and at times as the acting Superintendent of the South Shaanxi Province, though she was never recognised or reported on as working in these roles. As the CIM was non-denominational and transnational, she trained and mentored twenty-five young women missionaries in cohorts from eight different nations: women from Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, America, Norway, Sweden and Germany. She collaborated with Chinese women in running literacy schools for women, teacher training programmes, and Bible Women apprenticeship schemes. After 1950, Amy and her husband Percy Moore continued to work as faith missionaries amongst the Chinese diaspora in Singapore, Malaya, Thailand and Hong Kong.¹

This article investigates the colonial, missionary and international contexts that shaped Amy Moore’s work. It aims to locate her experiences within the constraints of colonialism in China, and within the tensions in missionary work from both within and from without, from international social and missionary movements of the interwar years. Moore’s work was responsive to a time of rapid change for rural Chinese women, where forms of modernisation in health, education, legislation and social reform began to affect the lives of rural women. Her achievements were in her work for literacy, where teaching illiterate and marginalised women to read and write in their own language was for her the foundation for spiritual and social change.

The historical context of Moore’s work was a life embedded in the systemic relations of colonialism, and the gendered dimensions of her work with women. In the words of Tani Barlow, China was in a state of semi-colonialism, a ‘layered formation of competing European powers,’ and the territorial invasions of the Japanese Empire. China was never a European colony, it still retained its political sovereignty, it had been historically successful in resisting colonisation, and its traditional culture had rejected change from outside.² Yet, as many others have noted, the Chinese experience of colonisation was through ideological rather than physical domination. In this critical view, the role of missionaries in semi-colonialism, from a Chinese perspective, was in the ‘trade in ideas.’ They brought with them not just the specifics of Christian belief, but the assumptions, techniques and racialism of western knowledge.³

In this space, Rey Chow reminds historians of the need to maintain an awareness of the continuing presence of colonisation in the twentieth century. Even by the 1920s China was the subject of military interventions from the European powers, as well as Japan, incursions based on unequal treaties, monetary indemnities, territorial concessions, trading privileges, and legal protections for foreigners known as the rights of extraterritoriality.⁴ These meant that missionaries could move around with impunity, for they were protected by treaties, and were subject only to the laws of their own nations, not under the jurisdiction of Chinese law. When forced to evacuate, missionaries would retreat to the foreign gunboats on a nearby river, or join the escort of a foreign militia through the mountains. Any questions over missionary motivation or actions, were thus in Chow’s indictment, ‘bound by historical determinants constructed on slaughter and blood’.⁵ Chow describes what she terms the ‘double-bind’ of missionary history, which is a tension this article aims to explore. In Chow’s words, this is ‘the ugliest double bind in the history of imperialism: while the kind personal intent behind many a missionary exploration of the “other” world must be recognised as a benign humanism … such explorations are implicated in colonialism and neo-colonialism’.⁶ Thus her challenge to historians of mission is to acknowledge the double bind, to probe its nuances, and outcomes. In encounters between western and Chinese women this requires a register of the anger, humiliation, rejection and subjugation present in exchanges, through what Chow termed the ‘logic of the wound’ expressing these emotions.⁷ Yet these exchanges were not one way, and Chinese women negotiated with missionaries to retain the integrity of their own culture, and to transform their own versions of spirituality.

Beyond the broad foundations of colonisation, Moore’s work was framed by the interwar international women’s movement, which campaigned to improve the status and condition of women globally. A powerful network of women’s organisations was initially based on an Anglo-American and European ascendancy, but moved in the 1920s to include non-western leaders from many contributing nations. They united in joint campaigns on women’s equality and social justice.⁸ International women worked through the League of Nations, its Mandates Commissions, and organisations like the International Labour Organisation, to lobby delegates directly, and to use these forums for raising their concerns.⁹ Inquiries and expert reports from the League that most affected the situation of women in China, were those on women’s working conditions in factories, or industrial labour, child labour, trafficking in women and girls, and bonded labour, or slavery.¹⁰ In the process international activists created a language around women’s equality as a universalist discourse of subjugation, that could be catalogued and compared through research and reporting. One outcome of these campaigns, that has yet to receive sufficient attention, was to shift western perceptions of Chinese cultural exceptionalism, by finding commonalities between women in work, culture and in society.

However strongly international activists spoke on behalf of Chinese women, they rarely connected with organised Chinese feminists, who ran their own domestic campaigns in the interwar period, mostly independent of direct contact with foreigners. Often domestic feminists saw missionaries as colonial agents, as obstacles and objects of resistance. Chinese Communists, Nationalists, and feminists campaigned from the early twentieth century for revolution and reform in the lives of Chinese women.¹¹ Nationalists campaigned for the final proscription of footbinding, and were successful by the 1920s, for women’s suffrage, for access to education, for a national system of public schooling and for increased access to higher education.¹² Chinese women’s organisations also independently focused on social reform, on liberalising divorce law, and legislation on inheritance, marriage, and industrial conditions for working women.¹³ Their demands for change challenged older missionary ideals of ‘working for women,’ and the rationale in many mission statements for the ‘rescue’ of Chinese women.

Through discussion with Chinese Christians, and through networks of mission women, Moore engaged in her own terms with the internationalist discourse of women’s emancipation. She could not, however, identify with anti-colonialist or Communist struggles that grounded the domestic campaigns. Her work towards modernising the lives of Chinese women aimed at accommodating twentieth-century semi-colonialism, both spiritually and morally, and improving the relationships between foreigners and nationals.

In 1929 when Moore joined the China Inland Mission she joined what was recognised as a world missionary movement, and also what was then termed the women’s missionary movement. These terms were not included in the official ideology of the China Inland Mission, but nevertheless reflected historical realities. The CIM was an hierarchical independent mission, both nondenominational and international, as previously noted. But it was a mission working in one nation and not cross-nationally, founded on the idea that China was a case in its own right: that China claimed the highest priority from the west, and that its need for Christian conversion was imperative.¹⁴ By the 1920s the internationalisation of mission work meant recognising the commonalities binding all women missionaries, beyond organisations and national divisions. Women in the CIM were influenced by international networks, and changing discussions about women’s work. Dana L. Robert, the historian of the American women’s mission movement, has delineated the shift in language used by the leaders in mission circles, from ‘women’s work for women,’ to ‘partnerships’ with non-western women as ‘sisters,’ and ‘friends,’ in a new form of international fellowship.¹⁵ Among contemporary young western women, Moore was charged anew with the creation of modern forms of womanhood, in a modernising version of the older cultural imperialism.¹⁶ New ideals of Christian womanhood reflected the changes called for by women activists, where women as citizens of a new China might claim their rights as participating equals.

Amy Moore began work with the generation of young missionaries working under the long legacies of the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, which had created a watershed in western mission thinking, and continued to set policy directions in the interwar years.¹⁷ The substantive legacy of the conference for the historiography of women’s missions was to set broad policy direction that underlined the social and cultural contexts of mission work. This discourse drew on older debates on social Christianity, and the social responsibilities of a good Christian life, which by the 1920s became known, especially in America, as the social gospel.¹⁸ A key strategy in implementing the social gospel was the imperative to hand over the work of national churches and missions to the local Christians themselves. This policy, called ‘Indigenisation’ in some circles, again drew from the ‘three self principles’ of nineteenth-century evangelicals: the rights of national Christians to self-governance, self-propagation, and self-funding.¹⁹ Its advocates called it the right to ‘actualise human potential … in the emerging realm of God’s kingdom on earth’.²⁰ The women’s missionary movement could see that all women had to be included in that actualisation. Brian Stanley, the historian of the world conference, pointed out that the three-self policy also provided an opening for ‘cultural pluralism,’ and the ‘respect for non-Christian religious experiences’, thus ‘the importance of the use of the vernacular, in order to develop culturally specific Christian terminology’.²¹ For women missionaries like Moore, here was a further call to work on adult women’s inclusion.

Proponents of the social gospel included international social reform movements linked to missions and churches, particularly the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement (WCTU). They both represented international movements of women, whose influence went well beyond their origins in Britain and America, with non-western branches around the world. The YWCA, for example, was an organisation modelled on earlier ideals of social Christianity and social service, where young women would work with others towards self-improvement, moral reform and good living. By the early twentieth century the organisation had moved towards programmes directed at the improvement not just of individuals and groups, but the whole of society.²² Sims summed this up in 1936 as a move towards ‘social faith,’ and that the ‘redemption of society’ because ‘the social structure no less than the individual life is the object of Christian redemption’.²³ The World YWCA appointed its first National Secretary to China in 1906, and Associations spread along the east coast cities. By 1936 there were 40 city Association branches, and 115 student branches. The Association branches quickly became led by Chinese woman, as western influence gave way to local direction. Associations were often based in schools and universities, and provided welfare work for women in urban areas, through hostels, clubs, education, literacy classes and language learning.²⁴ At the national level the Chinese YWCA branches joined international campaigns over working conditions in factories, against child labour, anti-footbinding and anti-concubinage. They liaised with international women in work for the International Labour Organisation.²⁵ The YWCA branches began as allies with the women missionaries, but by the 1930s their successful social and welfare work challenged older models of mission work for women.²⁶ YWCA work and its links with mission networks provided Moore with a framework for change that adapted elements from the social gospel.

Moore’s missionary work also reflected the presence of the transnational World Women’s Temperance Union, through both its British and American Unions. The WCTU based its world campaigns around appeals to evangelicalism, temperance and women’s equality.²⁷ In China the World WCTU established branches under the direction of the American organisation, and from the early 1900s sent out a succession of leading women to campaign against the use of opium and alcohol, prostitution, and the buying and selling of girls for bonded labour. By the 1930s, the organisation had allied its work with key women missionaries in eastern China. Their roles were to campaign and organise through information gathering, reporting, and publicising on opium and alcohol abuse, prostitution, and women’s emancipation. Their message, particularly on opium abuse, found a ready audience with CIM women who confronted daily its effects on the Chinese who came to the Mission.

Although international links between women’s missionary networks might imply new foundations for relationships between western and non-western women, for each missionary on the ground, each had still to face a ‘local and fraught journey’ in Penny Edmond’s phrase.²⁸ Individuals remained constrained by colonialism, modernisation, and the desire for evangelism, and mission work was unpredictable, contradictory, and ‘fragmented.’²⁹

In the enclosed space of the mission where Moore spent her time in exchanges with local women, women could share emotional and social bonds, and work for change. Recent scholarship on the history of emotions has analysed affective interchanges between women. Margaret Allen and Jane Haggis have shown missionaries making ‘professional effort,’ taking the right affective range and character, ‘expanding beyond right feeling to a community of emotion.’ Women’s work for women was to be based ‘not only on love and faith, but on a shared commitment to social uplift and moral regeneration.’³⁰ Patricia Grimshaw’s research also established the emotional and experiential registers of mission women’s lives: through subordinate marriages, the dangers of childbirth, disease and death, the pain of separation from children sent home for long years of schooling, and permanent separation from their own families.³¹ Affective ties between missionaries and Chinese could meliorate these experiences, and create bonds that lasted for generations. They did so in the case of Moore’s friends, and family. But these communities could always be undermined by the divisions of the colonial world.

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Amy Moore created a substantial intimate archive of letters writing about her life as missionary. She wrote almost every week over twenty years, from 1929 to 1949, and 360 manuscript letters remain. Some were lost through the exigencies of war in China, and the failings of the Australian postal system. There are 1,100 typed pages and 380,000 words, and more than sixty mission photographs in the archive. The writing is intense, personal and engaged. Moore is conversational, humorous about herself and her relationships, and self-aware. She constructs the intimate presence of her daily life and her musings on missionary work, through the small crevices of experience that create the narrative of self she wanted for her family and community. As Penny Summerfield has shown more generally, Moore was constructing her public persona.³² She wrote to her mother, Mabel Weir, but began with ‘My own dear ones,’ because she knew her letters crossed boundaries between public and private. Letters were shared around her extended family, and also to her ‘family’ in the church communities in Perth and Melbourne. She marked several ‘private’ when she wanted to talk to her mother about marriage and childbirth. At times the letters show Moore conscious of an independent self, as a woman who was able to ‘carve a space for an alternative self narrative,’ in Ruth Miller’s phrase.³³ Additional information comes from Amy’s son Raymond, who transcribed and edited her memoir, then published it in 2011, six years after Amy’s death.³⁴ The book is the quiet musings of a woman in her nineties looking into a past long gone, and is far distant from the passion and engagement of the young woman of the letters.

Amy Weir was a modern young Australian woman in the late 1920s. From the time she left the Perth Modern School in 1922, she worked both to help support her parents, but also to save to provide for her own training at the Melbourne Bible Institute. She had the confidence to make her own decisions about her future, and the determination to carry them through. It was unusual for a single woman aged 21 to fund herself, and to travel the 3,400 kilometres across Australia from Perth to Melbourne for training.³⁵ The policy of improving training for missionaries was one of the recommendations from the 1910 World Missionary Conference,³⁶ and this reflected broader moves in the west to improve the preparation for jobs like law, nursing, and teaching. Activists campaigned for recognition and registration of qualifications for entry into these emerging professions. There were moves to create knowledge specialisms, which had to be studied and examined in more rigorous ways than in the past. This meant a gradual shift away from apprenticeship models of training at work, to advanced post-school study. In Australia in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, school teaching and nursing shifted slowly to college-based education.³⁷ Missionary work followed, with institutes set up with teaching from experts, more rigorous standards of knowledge, and training in the applied skills of the work. The Melbourne Bible Institute was founded in 1920 to train missionaries to work in Australia amongst the Indigenous peoples, and in foreign missions in Africa, India and China. Its leadership and teaching reflected the British evangelical tradition, and it was interdenominational and independent.³⁸ The Institute ran a two year full time programme, centred on Bible Studies, but with a strong component of practical training. The curriculum was a solid course of study, with 14 h of lectures a week on the Old and New Testaments, one hour of doctrinal study, and weekly sessions with visiting missionaries. Group prayer meetings, testimonial meetings and regular meetings with the Director, were all testing and training sessions in themselves.³⁹ Men and women were segregated into separate residential colleges, but met for classes. The culture was set by the Director the Reverend Clifford Harris Nash who was responsible for much of the day to day teaching.⁴⁰ In her memoir, Amy Weir recalled that Nash would always offer the students two or three alternative interpretations of a text, and ask them to debate their own views.⁴¹

During 1929 and 1930 Amy Weir supported herself by part time work after hours. She scrabbled together her fees and a living allowance by taking on dressmaking, acting as a live-in companion, and housekeeping for other members of the local Baptist Church community.⁴² Her comment was that this was all good practice for working as a missionary, ‘when you had to live on a pittance and be self-reliant’.⁴³ After eighteen months’ study Amy was accepted as a candidate for the China Inland Mission. She wrote, ‘China has been growing on me for months, and now I know that it is the place that the Lord wants me’.⁴⁴ Acceptance by the CIM relied on Bible Institute achievements and reports. Amy Weir faced a selection panel of seven men, retired missionaries and ordained ministers. She was asked questions on her experiences of conversion, faith and redemption, and especially on her ‘call’ to missionary work in China. She knew that she would also be assessed in strongly gendered terms on her presentation and performance as a respectable young woman, as she put it, on her ‘manner, length and suitability of dress, whether your hair is bobbed or long’.⁴⁵ Her approach to mission work combined both pragmatism and the emotion of the call to evangelical work:

There isn’t much romance about missionary work, at least when you have seen it with the lid off, and I suppose I haven’t heard the worst even yet and really experiencing things must be ten times worse than just hearing - but in spite of it all it has a big pull when it is the Lord’s choice for me.⁴⁶

Amy Weir’s performance skills were crucial, in public demonstrations of spirituality, in speaking to large groups, and leading discussions on church teaching. She was assured in her knowledge of the Bible, and in drawing out the implications of its teaching.

After six month’s language training at Yangzhou, Jiangsu, in 1930, Amy Weir was appointed to the Province of Shaanxi (Shensi), under the charge of missionaries Arthur and Esther Moore. The Province sits in the far west of central China, and its capital is Xi’an, the ancient city on the trade routes of the Silk Road. Weir was based in the southern city of Hanzhong and its outstations.⁴⁷ Travel from Shanghai to Hanzhong took three months in 1931, by river boat, cart, sedan chair, donkey and by foot, and Hanzhong city was six days’ hard travel over the mountains from Xi’an. Shaanxi in the 1930s was a traditional Han Chinese society, isolated and rural. The educated élite of the old scholar class would have little to do with the CIM, so Weir’s work was almost exclusively with the poor, the marginalised and the labouring women from the city and its outlying villages.⁴⁸ The people of Shaanxi practised a multitude of faiths, from Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Animism to Islam.⁴⁹

The China Inland Mission by the 1930s was the largest mission organisation in China with 1,326 missionaries.⁵⁰ The Mission had been established in China for seventy years, and continually faced challenges to its presence in a hostile nation. Its nineteenth-century models of evangelising practice were struggling under criticism from within and without, and some CIM missionaries were searching for alternative ways of work. Founded in the 1860s by the English Reverend James Hudson Taylor, the Mission model was the itinerant evangelising lay preacher, preaching and teaching to villagers and strangers. The Mission had no institutions in place in the inland provinces, and no hierarchy of priesthood. The vision of the CIM was a moderate version of the colonial imperative: it aimed to separate religion and culture, to aim to Christianise rather than westernise the Chinese people.⁵¹ Its message was that the established missions had alienated the Chinese by their foreign language, their behaviour and customs. The CIM would adopt Chinese language and customs and live amongst the people in humble circumstances. At one level this policy had succeeded. CIM missionaries became fluent in local dialects, and could read and write in Mandarin; if they did not pass the Mission language examinations they could not continue as workers. Even by the 1930s missionaries still wore traditional Chinese dress and followed Chinese societal protocols. Amy throughout her time wore Chinese gowns. She never cut her hair, but rolled her long hair in the Chinese style round a roll of padding into a bun.⁵² Men of the 1930s did not grow a queue, as had earlier generations of missionaries, but on occasion wore a false queue attached to a cap as a compromise. Mission workers always lived with the villagers when travelling away from the Mission station. The lives of the missionaries were embedded in the local cultures of the cities in which they lived, for accommodation, food, clothing, and travel. CIM missionaries were allocated a living allowance and not a salary, and they lived in relative poverty when compared with other foreign missionaries. They were expected to rely on support from the Chinese Christian community around them, and the faith and funds of supporters at home, and they often had to make do at a subsistence level.

Yet at the heart of the CIM experience lay the double bind of its colonising presence. Despite its attempts not to westernise the people, the central purpose of the CIM was unilaterally to import a foreign religion on its own terms. This tension made for increasing instability amongst missionaries. Some remained convinced that the most adversarial models of conversion remained necessary, others had accepted some level of alignment with Chinese spirituality, and practised more pluralist approaches. There were missionaries within the CIM who aligned their evangelical work with the age-old Chinese practices of releasing demons, and healing the sick.⁵³ Other missionaries moved away from the direct evangelical imperatives of conversion and baptism. Famously Mildred Cable, and Francesca and Eva French became mobile preachers and travellers through the Gobi Desert and the far North Western provinces, publishing well-researched anthropological observations on the people they encountered.⁵⁴ Susie Garland worked with her sister Ann to provide translations of the Bible into a form of Braille for the blind.⁵⁵ Nellie Marchbank worked in Guixi to effectively take administrative and philanthropic control of the city, running schools, hospitals and charities all in the name of the Mission.⁵⁶ Moore was amongst younger women in the Mission who, without the formal notice of the organisation, or recognition for their achievements, implemented elements of a progressive social gospel.

The Mission was struggling to maintain the traditions set by the 1870s, and unchanged in Mission ideology since. When Weir arrived in China, around 60% of missionaries were women, but the strict gender demarcations of the work were still clear.⁵⁷ In the Shaanxi Province there were 23 mission centres run by the CIM, with 22 male missionaries and 35 female missionaries. Only six of the 23 mission outstations were led by women.⁵⁸ Although the Mission journal editorialised on women in 1934, that ‘women have faced the hardships of pioneer work as well as the men’,⁵⁹ the structure of mission work, mission protocols, and the daily interactions between women and men all remained deeply gendered. Women in the CIM faced systemic discrimination in language training, in levels of appointment, and in options for work, as Rhonda Semple has shown.⁶⁰

By the 1920s CIM women were calling for further recognition, and change. A focus on the emancipation of women in international women’s movements lead to a self-reflective moment in the missionary movement: what was the place of women in the Mission? The frustration in the CIM, along with most other missions, was that all the leadership positions were taken by men, without exception. There were isolated calls for recognising the contribution of women, the right to preach, to deliver the sacrament, to take on the leadership in the Mission. Sue Grunewold has noted that Canadian woman wrote on these issues to the Toronto headquarters of the CIM.⁶¹ Mildred Cable wrote in 1922 in the Chinese Recorder that there were ‘many ways through which the Spirit of God may manifest Himself by the ministry of women.’ She argued that ‘upon the leaders of the Church … lies the burden of responsibility to see, to recognise and use the spiritual endowments of all its members’.⁶² But her call went unheeded, and Cable moved on to travels and evangelising in the Gobi Desert and Xinjiang.⁶³ There was little cultural change in the CIM over its 90 years of existence.

Amy Weir’s letters show that she negotiated mission structures and conventions to redesign her work, to reflect the changing environment internationally and nationally. She continued as a full time worker for all of her twenty years in Shaanxi, without seeking recognition, or even public reporting on her activities. Weir served her missionary apprenticeship with two senior single women, Katherine Cooke in Chenggu in 1932, and Edith Parr in Yangxian in 1933.⁶⁴ These two were both from an older generation of women, who had been in China for more than twenty years, and were well established working in the evangelising model of CIM work. The days were filled with travelling to villages, and preaching with Bible Women, running Sunday school, and at times the church services in the absence of male missionaries. In Hanzhong Amy met Percy Moore, a British recruit from 1929.⁶⁵ Percy Moore came from an established missionary family on both sides. His father, Arthur Moore, had been converted to mission work while working as a detective in the International Settlement in Shanghai. Percy’s mother, Esther Andrew had been born in Lanzhou in Gansu Province, the daughter of two CIM missionaries. Amy and Percy married in 1934, and spent seven years at Xixiang from 1934 to 1939; consolidating their lives as a working couple. Then they worked in the city of Hanzhong from 1940 to 1949. Amy’s working life was punctuated by the birth of four children, and one miscarriage. Three children were born at home in Hanzhong, and one in Perth. The pattern of family existence in the 1930s was interrupted by evacuations and retreats, avoiding Nationalist government and Communist troops moving through Shaanxi, and travel where roaming bands of brigands and anti-foreigner violence might erupt without warning. The invasion by Japan in 1937 meant that travel was confined to Free China. During the Second World War, the family and the Hanzhong community had to go into hiding from Japanese bombing raids, and later an American air force base was established in the city. Amy’s Moore’s response throughout was pragmatic:

A place can be safe as a bank one day and be looted by brigands and communists the next so we just have to work where and when we can and when the time comes to go, then just go.⁶⁶

In June 1935 Moore wrote reflecting on her future. As a senior missionary, she now had some freedom in her programme of work. She asked, ‘What will bear the most impact? What does the Lord intend me to do’?⁶⁷ In her mind the Mission had reached the stage where more power could be transferred to the Chinese Christian community, both women and men. She planned for the preaching to be done by male evangelists and the Bible women. She reflected that she would have more impact in teaching, not girls, but the women of the province, and that teaching women to read and write in their own language in the local Shaanxi dialect, was the greatest priority. She was proud of her own command of the language and her skills in calligraphy, and, in the spirit of the three self movement, was ready to work with illiterate women.

Moore’s plan was not an entirely new one, for by the 1930s about twenty schools for adult women were run in western provinces by women working for the China Inland Mission.⁶⁸ The CIM had not previously put a priority on adult literacy, especially for Chinese women. At the conclusion of a women’s Bible School in Zhoukou, Henan, in 1933, one of the Chinese women said, ‘And to think of it, when I came I could not write a single character! Truly “What hath God wrought”’!⁶⁹ Moore reflected at the time, ‘The women have such a great longing to learn.’⁷⁰ The schools were called Bible Studies Schools, or Institutes, and they took a variety of forms, at the discretion of the local missionary group. All were run by women for women exclusively, as was appropriate within traditional Chinese culture. They could range in time from a few weeks of classes to programmes that took a year and where students graduated with a diploma.⁷¹ The knowledge base was of course instruction in Christianity and the stories of the Bible, but a closer examination of the women’s schools run by Moore reveals that they were conceived with broader progressive aims. They were focused on teaching women literacy, in the local dialect of Mandarin, and equipping them for active engagement in their own society: this could be as workers for the Mission, as Bible Women, or teachers or assistants, but it could also be to enable them to participate as citizens in a secular society. The women who came to Bible Schools run by Moore were the marginalised and the off casts in society. They were older women who were no longer constrained by the extended family, they were widows, or divorcees or concubines. They could also be escaped bondservants, or women escaping marriage in the extended patriarchal household. Very few of these women had had any chance of schooling in the 1920s and 1930s. In Shaanxi the illiteracy rate for women was 80%.⁷² Those Chinese women and girls who were literate were from the élite classes in the cities, who had been educated at home. Shishu or village schools were traditional local ventures, inducting mostly boys in the basics of a classical Chinese education, but they only ran for two or so years and rarely included girls.⁷³ The Nationalist Government had legislated to make primary education mandatory for all in 1928,⁷⁴ but had done little to make this happen in rural areas, and nothing for adult education for the majority of women citizens.⁷⁵

In this context, Moore made a conscious retreat from the older models of missionary work for women. She worked to lead Chinese women and girls into all facets of mission life, and to make the transition to a Chinese controlled church. Amidst the arrival of the children, and in the chaos of the life of the province, Moore adapted her work to deliver programmes that could include her children alongside, with support from Chinese women, and from other women missionaries like Esther Moore and Martha Haslam. Moore would schedule classes round babies’ sleeping and feeding times. Often her students brought along small children themselves. Moore redefined the tradition of ‘women’s work for women,’ yet teaching had to be based on understanding and intimacy:

I wish you would pray that I might really get to know these women, know their homes and their lives and get to understand them and be real friends with them. It is possible in China to live here in the midst of the people and yet only really touch the surface of their lives, because we are foreigners, but I want to go deeper than that if possible. I feel I am getting to know them better but even so I have a good way to go yet.⁷⁶

Teaching literacy was also a response to the needs of Bible Women, who took on the much of the evangelising work. These women were more effective in communicating and explaining to locals, but they needed further training to become leaders in the church. They continued to act as diplomats for the missionaries, and act as minders and mentors protecting foreign women from the social and cultural blunders implicit in their exchanges with village people.⁷⁷

The teaching was done in collaboration with Chinese women, as teaching assistants, both paid and volunteers. Chinese workers would help with children, with preparing food, and running additional classes. Mrs Chen was a constant presence at Hanzhong, at times supported by her daughter Joy Chen. Classes for women grew from 1932, and by 1937 in Xixiang had grown to full time Bible Schools, conference sessions, and evening classes. The Bible School curriculum included nine subjects. Amy taught Job and Malachi from the Old Testament, Romans to Revelation from the New Testament, Church History, and Singing. Mrs Chen taught Comparative Religions and the Old Testament.⁷⁸ In the final term of the school, women students were given ‘practical work,’ which included placements, evangelising with other western missionaries. In 1938 Amy wrote to every CIM woman in the District to ask that they take on graduates for short term placements.⁷⁹ Classes did not just include rote learning of Bible knowledge. Texts in Chinese calligraphy were printed by the CIM and other missions, and the British and Foreign Bible Society. Moore wrote of her desire to draw on the lessons for life in her teaching, on the social and moral applications of reading and writing for a good Christian life. In this she echoed the words of American missionary Ida Main, who wrote in 1936:

Living near every church and Christian school are multitudes of people who will have no opportunity to read unless we teach them … Certainly for them we have a responsibility, because no Christian is truly intelligent about our Gospel, until he has learned to read the Bible for himself. So we have the need, and the field.⁸⁰

In one month in 1944, Moore ran ten Bible Schools, moving around the province to different towns and cities. Moore was aware of the potential of teaching illiterate women to read and write. ‘Poor souls, they have so few opportunities of learning’, she wrote in 1935.⁸¹ Gail Hershatter’s historical research on 1940s village women in the same counties in Shaanxi, supports Moore’s approach, as she shows how women were empowered when they were taught to read the legal documents that related to their lives, in employment, marriage, divorce, widowhood, and inheritance.⁸²

Moore framed her teaching in terms such as ‘the need to know’, ‘the desire for knowledge’, and she believed that there could be no true turn to Christianity without the power to understand and read about the message.⁸³ She did not use the older missionary discourse of ‘rescuing’ or ‘saving’ women. Moore rejected older models of child removal, and withdrawing women and forcing them to reject their own culture. Her approach was a layered one, to layer the new learning and the new spiritual knowledge of Christianity onto the old culture, to empower women to take the messages back to their own communities themselves and negotiate all the hard bargains that this might imply.⁸⁴ The model of rescuing women and girls had not finally become obsolete, for Maud Dymond set up an institution for runaway slave girls or bondservants with the CIM in Yunnan in 1931. She called this a Slave Girls’ Home and received funding from the eminent British Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society.⁸⁵ The Home collapsed dismally within three years, when girls ran away from a strict regime that forced them to practise unfamiliar skills, like western cooking, sewing, and language. Servants were bribed to help resell the girls to new owners, and some girls even resold themselves at higher prices, claiming advanced training.⁸⁶ Yet by the 1930s Chinese progressive movements for change, as Ransmeier has shown, had moved to modernise local systems of female bondage and servitude.⁸⁷

Moore’s work in adult education was thus a retreat from the ideologies of western domesticity modelled by women in earlier missions, who saw the idealised western family home as the site for the expression of an ideal Christian life.⁸⁸ There is no evidence in Moore’s letters of teaching adult classes in the domestic virtues of western culture, cooking, cleaning or childcare. Whilst Amy sewed all her family’s clothes on a Singer hand machine, she did not think it was appropriate to teach sewing, embroidery or knitting. She saw reading and writing as far more valuable skills in leading to a Christian life. When reflecting on her domestic life, she went further:

I could be quite content (if I were home) just looking after my home and my husband and my babies, but since we are here as the Lord’s servants His work must come first and the extra things I would really enjoy doing myself have to be left to the servants or done in spare minutes at night … I know I could never be happy anywhere else when the Lord wants me here.⁸⁹

As Connie Schemo has shown, rather than seeing these schools as imports from the west, it is important to consider how Shaanxi women used their new learning, and how they influenced the development of the schools. Shemo’s nuanced studies of missionary colonialism show how western-trained Chinese women doctors took the lead in improving the lives of Chinese women.⁹⁰ Following Schemo, it is more accurate then to see the Bible Studies schools for women as places where Chinese women decided how they might participate in education, on their own terms. For them, literacy offered a path for upward mobility. Although the outcomes for graduates are difficult to trace through Moore’s letters, it is clear that classes were very popular, and continued with large numbers whenever they ran. Data in China’s Millions, although always overly optimistic, also reported on hundreds of women turning up for classes in several other provinces.⁹¹ Women students from Moore’s classes were noticed only in the margins of her stories home, but she related stories of how individuals went on to become mission assistants, teachers in both the mission and in government schools, and in the case of Joy Chen, a doctor. Graduates often went their own way, rather than staying on as converts, and Moore seemed to accept this with humour and tolerance. It was crucial that these schools were open to a broad range of local women; enabling them to become economically more self-sufficient, and freed to a greater extent to take charge of their own lives.

Moore’s work for adult literacy also reflected the international movement for the return of the missions to local Christians. After the 1910 World Missionary Conference, mission groups in China moved in 1922 to form an ecumenical organisation, the united Protestant Chinese Christian Church, as a first stage in this transition. But the CIM withdrew from national level cooperation by 1926, after objecting to modernist theological trends in some allied missions. The CIM had earlier accepted the three self principles, and mandated reports from the late 1920s from each province on their progress handing over churches to self-governance.⁹² Both Amy and Percy were supporters of the 1934 Director in Shanghai, Bishop Frank Houghton, who was an advocate for this progressive transition to a Chinese controlled church. Missionaries would shift their roles to provide support as invited experts. Houghton saw the link between literacy and effective transfer of power to local Chinese when he wrote:

Of the special problems the Chinese Church is facing, one of the greatest is illiteracy … To the poor the Gospel has been preached, and the majority of them- if we take the women alone, the vast majority – are still unable to read. The percentage of literates is far higher within the Church than outside it. The greatly increased sale of Bibles during the last five years is a striking proof of progress in this respect. But the goal of a ‘100-per-cent Bible-reading Church’ is far from being attained.⁹³

When writing about the lives of Chinese women she encountered, Moore used the racialised language of mid twentieth-century colonialism, often in tension with her response to individual women’s suffering and sorrow. At a few moments of pain, she lashed out at the subjugation of local women. Her words echoed the hard points of an older mission orientalising discourse, and she assumed that her readers at home would share her anger.⁹⁴ When Moore commented on religious differences she occasionally referred to the racial hierarchies used to place Christian belief above all other religions, to connect with her readers at home, or as a reflection of the conservatism of her own evangelical beliefs. She referred to ‘heathen darkness’, and ‘vile heathen life’, ‘girls living without any hope in this world’, and ‘families of rank idolaters’. One church member was excommunicated when she gave away her thirteen year old daughter to a ‘heathen soldier’. When she heard of a woman killing her two baby daughters, she wrote to her mother that ‘the social life of the Chinese is absolutely rotten’.⁹⁵ At the same time Moore aimed to understand what she saw in terms of the rapid modernising change taking place for women around her. When she was shocked by the suicide of a young wife nearby, she added:

When one thinks of the lives some of these girls live without any hope in this world or the next, one hardly blames them for trying to put an end to their misery. If only they knew the One that could make them happy.⁹⁶

‘One can’t wonder that they think death preferable to life,’ she wrote later, pointing to her knowledge of the limited marriage choices women faced.⁹⁷ When she met Mrs Hu, the concubine of the local magistrate, Moore commented, ‘The devil surely has power in this land, and my heart just aches for some of these women when I think of the lives they live and often through no fault of their own.’⁹⁸ Historians Bryna Goodman and Beverley Bossler have recently uncovered contemporary domestic campaigns for reform of marriage, concubinage and divorce.⁹⁹

When Moore wrote about the curse of opium addiction in the community, she wrote as a modern missionary who accepted the changing contexts for healthcare in China. When she first saw the vast crops of opium grown in the province, she described them as ‘pictures of sin’, using the moralising discourse of previous generations of missionaries.¹⁰⁰ Some like Mildred Cable and Pastor Hsi in the 1910s had set up refuges for addicts, and programmes for withdrawal and detoxification, that included evangelising along the way.¹⁰¹ Moore observed that opium addiction was often at the base of family breakdown, family violence, gambling and destitution, which brought the community to seek solace from the Mission. But Moore’s approach took account of the contemporary Nationalist government and missionary action on opium, which has been uncovered by Timothy Brook and Kathleen Lodwyck.¹⁰² In this she was reflecting on progress at the international level, where the League of Nations had run its first International Opium Convention in 1925. Although China did not ratify this convention, throughout the 1930s China attempted regulation of land use and prohibition of the trade, with limited success. By 1937 the Nationalist Government ratified the League’s Convention for the Suppression of Illicit Drugs.¹⁰³ The CIM position at this time was conflicted, as it published critiques of the economic and cultural regime of empire built on the opium trade through India, and called it a ‘great blot on English history’.¹⁰⁴ Even so, conversion tales in the journal continued to rely on the iconic figure of the single addict who found redemption through Christianity, and was restored to good health. In Szechuan ‘opium breaking refuges’ and ‘opium breaking Bible Schools’ were reported on optimistically.¹⁰⁵ These were not the approaches to opium addiction taken by Moore, who took account of international and national action. She followed the more progressive leadership in the Mission and saw the opium problem as a medical and political problem, where the solution lay in improved clinics and treatment regimes, and one where international action was changing the terms of debate.¹⁰⁶

When Moore encountered women with bound feet, her responses were removed from the perverse racial attention of earlier missionaries, who had made the unbinding of feet a prerequisite for conversion to Christianity. ‘It seems such a shame to see them hobbling on their little feet’, she wrote in 1932, but she added, ‘most of the younger generation now have normal sized feet’.¹⁰⁷ Moore recognised Chinese not western agendas for change, and recent research has detailed Chinese movements for reform.¹⁰⁸ By the 1920s local government campaigns in Shaanxi had begun to penalise families for practising foot binding. In Liquan, near Xian, a Chinese Natural Foot Society had been set up in 1929. By the 1930s only 40% of rural women had bound feet, and by the 1940s, only 20%.¹⁰⁹

The CIM model of embedding missionaries in Chinese culture had officially rejected ‘westernisation’ as its vision. In one sense, when missionaries lived with respect for the people and their customs, the Mission succeeded. But this was only practicable so far. At night, Amy and Percy retreated to their western domestic space, and western values of privacy, cooking, cleaning and custom.¹¹⁰ CIM women, whether married or single, lived a conflicted life of domestic isolation from people around them. Amy Moore ran a western household for her husband and four children, and she had oversight of the women students’ behaviour, appearance and values in her classrooms. Clearly her teaching style fit within western traditions with its focus on texts, transcription, interpretation and rote learning.

Amy Moore’s life course through twenty years moved through apprenticeship, courtship, marriage, childbirth, mothering, nursing, illness, and death. Through all these experiences she created emotional links with Chinese women living alongside her, and with women missionary colleagues. As she reflected on Mrs Xiao:

I always marvel at how wise Mrs Xiao is in her thinking and in her contacts with church workers- she has learned by bitter experience I guess. She certainly is a good friend and has often given me a word of warning or advice when she thought I did not know something or perhaps understand the inner meaning.¹¹¹

As she described it, ‘it is more help to the ordinary Chinese to have us with the same home problems as they have and yet seeking to serve the Lord at the same time’.¹¹² Exchanges were based on shared life experiences as women, and often sympathy and affection. She spoke with pride about how people would come to the Mission ‘and talk to me and pray with me when they are in trouble and difficulty, whereas they find it harder to open out to a stranger.’¹¹³ Moments of openness and emotion were recorded through major life changes, in tension at times with the racial and gendered boundaries of everyday life. In her stories Moore experienced the intersecting emotions of tolerance, sympathy, and friendship, as well as rejection, defiance and attack.

At times she revealed how far a modern young woman might go to break through the constraints of her world. One case was Amy Moore’s experience of childbirth. In the 1930s westerners were still treated by western doctors and nurses, but especially for women during childbirth. Women in the CIM could be sent across to the east coast from the inland provinces for medical care, but war zones across the country in the 1930s made the journey from South Shaanxi impossible. By 1934 incursions from Communist and Nationalist troops, and occasional attacks from bands of brigands and Japanese were regular events. Amy and Percy married in January 1934, and by January 1935 they were expecting the birth of their first child. Amy prepared for the birth under traditional western protocols, making all the baby clothes, and preparing the household at Xixiang. She also planned to follow Chinese custom and remain secluded in the house for a month after the birth. Three of the CIM missionaries in the District had some experience of childbirth, but all were unable or unwilling to take on the responsibility. ‘It looked as if I was being deserted’, were Amy’s words in her memoir, ‘Well if none of our own people want to help me I’ll ask Dr Xiao, whatever they may think about that’. She knew very well that this was ‘very much taboo, and a shameful thing for a young woman to do’, but she went ahead and moved to Hanzhong.¹¹⁴ Dr Xiao was a Chinese doctor trained in western medicine, and a member of the Hanzhong Christian community. It was a long and dangerous labour, and she was supported by the doctor and by Esther Moore and Martha Haslam. At one point Arthur Moore, her father-in-law, also came in to her room and held her for two hours, in a poignant image of family care. Dr Xiao saved her life by using chloroform and forceps, and brought the baby boy to safety. Dr Xiao conducted the Christian dedication service for baby Raymond, and the Xiaos remained close friends and supporters for the rest of the life of the Mission. Amy’s access to this specialised medical care was not that of most of her Chinese peers, for they faced even more perilous experiences of childbirth. The women of South Shaanxi were supported by traditional midwives and healers, but they were generally untrained in methods of sterilised medicine and surgery. Death rates in child birth were very high, and only improved when the Communist Government brought in programmes in the 1950s to train local health teams in sterile birthing practices.¹¹⁵

There remained racial and colonial divides, despite emotional links formed within the community. With the birth of the Moore children came new dimensions of racial segregation, with western demands that the babies be kept separate from Chinese custom and culture. One powerful racial segregation forced on the Moore family was enacted by the Mission itself, and by emergencies of the Second World War. From 1940 onwards the children were sent away to the CIM Mission school firstly at Chefoo, Yantai, in Shandong, 1,600 kilometres away on the east coast. The emotional register of Amy Moore’s letters changed, and they became shot through with pain and for the loss of daily interactions with her three sons. Frank Moore wrote of this as ‘a wrench, a tearing apart she would never get over’.¹¹⁶ Amy knew about the CIM system of boarding missionary children, and she accepted the need for British schooling, as a racialised protection against children becoming immersed in Chinese culture. She could not acknowledge the colonial segregation in place. The Mission rules demanded that parents could only educate their children up to the age of seven, after which they were obliged to attend the school. Other missions did not usually provide schooling for their children, who were sent to home countries. The school was modelled on a British boarding school for boys and girls, from seven to sixteen, and aimed to prepare students for university and further training.¹¹⁷ Often it was the kind of school that parents would not have been able to afford at home. With the Andrew and Moore families, the school came with the heavy weight of family history. When Raymond was sent on in 1940 aged six and a half, Amy’s grief was acute. She could not reconcile herself to this mode of mothering, and it stood outside all her own family experiences. Her pain continued as she separated from Alan in 1943, when he was sent to a wartime campus in Kalimpong in India, and then from Frank in 1947 to Kuling, Jinjiang. All was made more intense by the closure of occupied China, and the news that Raymond and the school had been interned by the Japanese and held in a detention camp until 1945. She wrote:

One little realises when first coming to China what ‘counting the cost’ and ‘sacrificing all’ may involve, and sometimes my heart just feels sore with the thought of Raymond in a concentration camp and Alan way down in Sichuan at school - we have never yet had all our four children at home together.¹¹⁸

When Moore wrote about her own absent children, they were front of mind, but she did acknowledge the suffering of the Chinese around her, and the many children who died from famine, epidemic disease and civil war. As she put it, ‘I guess we are no worse off than hundreds of parents in war areas who have had to part with their kiddies’.¹¹⁹ She acknowledged that Chinese women had lost husbands and sons to conscription and fighting in the wars that raged throughout China. As she wrote again and again, ‘Our hearts ache for poor old China’.

In exchanges with Amy Moore, the Shaanxi women responded on their own terms. As Jonathan Spence put it, ‘The Chinese would not accept the Westerners on the terms on which they saw themselves’.¹²⁰ The women heard the stories told by westerners, and brought a separate sense of misrecognition, caricature and difference from exchanges. We read something of the shock, insult and desire in the colonial encounter worked through Chinese records of the time, but not directly through this archive of letters.¹²¹ As Li has shown, the Chinese rejected the western presence as an attack on the land, wealth and the body of Chinese society.¹²² The double bind described by Rey Chow was recounted in Moore’s letters, as she used the language of saving, teaching, knowing, and making an impact; and yet her colonising desire was reflected when she commented on the state of the Chinese nation in the 1940s.¹²³ She thought that the ‘door of opportunity’ would soon close for China, and that ‘it will be impossible for foreigners to preach here any longer’,¹²⁴ reflecting fear and anxiety at anti-foreigner violence from all sides of the political spectrum.¹²⁵ As A. E. Small, a fellow missionary put it in 1941, ‘unless we act at once the century of Protestant Christianity in this land will count for nought. China’s enemies will be ruthless in stamping out unwanted organisations’.¹²⁶ Moore saw China besieged by Japan and left alone by the indifference of European powers. ‘Poor old China - she seems to fall out of one trouble into another’, she wrote.¹²⁷ For her it was a loss of confidence in the place of the Mission in the future of the nation. She accepted official Mission opposition towards ‘godless Communism’, but sensed that the ‘Reds’ had real purchase with the common people, when ‘soldiers are soldiers one day and brigands the next,’ and when Nationalist soldiers around her could turn Red.¹²⁸

The Moores were under no illusion that their presence was generally welcome in China. Mission documents warned recruits to expect hostility and resistance, and lives of hardship. Amy noted small acts of rejection from the local population in passing. Burglary, looting and robbery were common enough threats from the very poor amongst whom they lived, and missionaries could be held up and robbed of everything they carried, even if they too had almost nothing. Their day-to-day experience often included smaller acts of rejection and distrust, verbal attacks, anger, and occasional physical violence. The mission station became at times a place of retreat and a walled fortress, and evacuations and evasive retreats and plans to avoid dangerous places were daily fare. For both Amy and Percy the raw impact of Chinese anger at the colonial presence of the missionaries came closest in February 1935, when the Communist Army captured CIM missionaries Ruth and Charlie Frencham, and then held them in captivity for seven weeks in Sichuan. At first Amy reported that the couple had been killed, then reported the ‘miracle’ that they had been released. The Frenchams, however, were released without harm. Ruth, despite being seven months pregnant, had travelled with a brigade of Red Army women.¹²⁹ Dr Xiao delivered their baby in Hanzhong eleven days after they were freed. Moore’s distress at their experience were the details she retold over the six month period of waiting for news.¹³⁰

This article explores the contested history of missionary interventions in one woman’s life, through her local and fraught journey, where the mission experience, in Penny Edmonds words, was ‘multivalent, highly fragmented’, and ‘both inclusive and repressive at the same time’.¹³¹ The double bind in Amy Moore’s life was that, although she worked for evangelisation and improvement in the lives of Chinese women, her achievements were often undermined by the colonising relations she was dependent on. In Joanna Cruickshank’s words, ‘missionary women played their part in collaborating with colonialism, even as they carried out humanitarian work’.¹³² Moore aimed to moderate the effects of a century of semi-colonialism in China, through teaching literacy. She believed that women were central to the work of evangelism, but also that the ability to read and write would enable illiterate woman to take on roles as leaders in the future church. But Moore’s world was still a mission lead by missionaries, and the promised transfer of power to Chinese communities was fragmented. Women had yet to receive recognition beyond their roles as teachers, assistants and Bible Women. Moore was silent on these omissions. In moments of self-reflection, she did not question the layers of racial segregation in her life; in mission work, healthcare, parenting, schooling, and in a domestic life set apart from Chinese people.

Moore’s work shows how missionaries on the ground, working at the grass roots, far from the mission leaders in the metropoles of Shanghai or London, could respond to locals in different ways, and imagine different outcomes for marginalised rural women. Moore took note of the rapid changes around her in the 1930s, and changed mission practice to reflect Chinese modernities. She understood that the women of the province were facing social and political reform and revolution from both Nationalists and Communists.

The international contexts of Moore’s work provided her with a renewed concern for the condition of women. Although the position of the ‘Eastern’ and the ‘other’ woman had always been a perceived rationale for missions, the international women’s movements gave Chinese women prominence, and their language changed to become more pluralist. The Chinese woman was seen as less exceptional, less differentiated from other cultures, and that commonalties existed between all women. Women’s organisations gave Moore a model for social change and for implementing elements of the social gospel. Moore’s theological beliefs remained conservative and evangelical, but like many women in faith missions, they did not circumscribe her daily practical activities. Her work was not an unidirectional exercise of power, and its outcomes were often unpredictable and contradictory. Moore’s students engaged with classes on their own terms, and at times heard the Christian message, but also took the tools of literacy, the skills of working outside the household, and in community with other women. All would be useful in facing the changes ahead in Chinese society.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Paddle

Honorary Professor Sarah Paddle previously held the role of Associate Dean, Teaching and Learning within the Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Australia. She played a national role in teaching and learning in the Arts and Humanities. Sarah Paddle has published on Australian women's history and cross-cultural histories of women in Australia, Britain and China. The Australia-China Council previously funded joint research with Associate Professor Li Ping, from Remnin University, Beijing. Publications include studies of western feminists, colonisation and international citizenship, and the interwar Chinese slave girl campaigns.

Notes

1 I would like to thank Frank Moore for his support for the writing of this article, and his permission to quote from the letters of Amy Moore. Thanks are also due to Deborah Jordan, Li Ping, and the two anonymous readers, for helpful advice on earlier versions.

Letters of Amy Moore, China 1930–1949, ed. Frank Moore, [manuscript] Private Collection, October 2023. There are 360 letters in 1100 typed pages, and 60 photographs. For Amy Moore’s life see: ‘Three Score Years and Ten’ Missionary Work in China: The Story of Three Generations of the Andrew/Moore Family in China, transcribed Raymond Moore (Traralgon: Kyema Publishing, 2011); Amy Moore, The Mercer Story and Amy's Story, transcribed Raymond Moore (Traralgon: Kyema Publishing, 2011).

2 Tani Barlow, ‘Eugenic Woman, Semi-colonialism and Colonial Modernity as Problems for Postcolonial Theory’, in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, eds. Antoinette Burton, et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 368–70; Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham, Duke University Press, 2004), 48–51.

3 Barlow, ‘Eugenic Woman, Semi-colonialism’, 377.

4 Rey Chow, Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 3–5.

5 Rey Chow, ‘How the Inscrutable Chinese led to Globalised Theory’, PMLA 116, no. 1 (January 2001): 69–74; Chow, A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present (New York, Columbia University Press, 2021); Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

6 Rey Chow ‘“Violence in the Other Country”: China as Crisis, Spectacle and Woman’, in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Mohanty (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 87–95. Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘Gender Colonialism and Faith’, Journal of Women’s History 25, no. 1 (2013): 182–94.

7 Rey Chow, Literary and Cultural Studies, 3–5.

8 See Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women. The Making of an International Women's Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Karen M. Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 341–78; Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stubbs, ‘Women’s International Activism During the Interwar Period’, Women’s History Review 26, no. 2 (2017): 163–172.

9 Regula Ludi, ‘Setting New Standards in International Feminism and the League of Nations’ Inquiry into the Status of Women’, Journal of Women’s History 31, no. 1 (2019): 12–36; Susan Pedersen, ‘Metaphors of the Schoolroom: Women Working the Mandates System of the League of Nations’, History Workshop Journal 66, no.1 (2008): 188–207; Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Susan Zimmermann, ‘The International Labour Organisation, Transnational Women’s Networks, and the Question of Unpaid Work in the Interwar World’, in Women in Transnational History: Connecting the Local and the Global, eds. Clare Midgely, Alison Twells and Julie Carlier (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2016).

10 Historians in the field have underlined the colonial relations in these networks. See Sarah Paddle, ‘“For the China of the Future”. Western Feminists, Colonisation and International Citizenship in China in the Inter-war Years’, Australian Feminist Studies 16, no. 36 (2000): 325–341; Paddle, ‘The Limits of Sympathy: International Feminists and the Chinese “Slave Girl” Campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial Studies, 4, no. 3 (2003): 2–22. Susan Pedersen, ‘The Maternalist Moment in British Colonial Policy. The Controversy over “Child Slavery” in Hong Kong 1917–1941’, Past and Present 171, no. 2 (2001): 161–202.

11 Gail Hershatter, Women in China's Long Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Gail Hershatter, Women and China's Revolutions (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

12 Louise Edwards and Mina Roces, eds. Women's Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism and Democracy (London: Routledge, 2004); Louise Edwards and Mina Roces, eds. Women's Movements in Asia: Feminisms and Transnational Activism (London: Routledge, 2010); Tani Barlow, Question of Women 67–71.

13 Christina K. Gilmartin and others, eds. Engendering China. Women, Culture, and the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

14 Alvin Austin, China’s Millions: The China inland Mission and Late Qing Society, 1832–1905 (Grand Rapids, MI: Erdmans, 2007).

15 Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission. A Social History of their Thought and Practice (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996); Renate Howe, A Century of Influence: The Australian Student Christian Movement 1896–1996 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2009), 171–197; Joanna Cruickshank, ‘Race, History, and the Australian Faith Missions’, Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction 34, no. 3 (December 2010): 39–52; Sarah Paddle, ‘“To Save the Women of China from Fear, Opium and Bound Feet”: Australian Women Missionaries in Early Twentieth-Century China’, Itinerario - International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction 34, no. 3 (2011): 67–82; Fiona Paisley, ‘From Missionary Work in the Pacific to the Future of India: Jean Begg on Faith, Friendship and Social Science in a Life of Service’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 22, no. 3 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2021.0047; Joanna Cruickshank and Patricia Grimshaw, White Women, Aboriginal Missions and Australian Settler Governments: Maternal Contradictions (Leiden, Brill, 2019), 106–129; Elizabeth Prevost, The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–29; Christine Bolt, Sisterhood Questioned: Race, Class and Internationalism in the American and British Women's Movements 1880s–1970s (London: Routledge, 2005), 11–17.

16 Laura R. Prieto, ‘Introduction: Women and Missionary Encounters with Foreign Nationalism in the 1920s’, Diplomatic History, 43, no. 2 (2019): 237–245; Connie Shemo, ‘Imperialism, Race, and Rescue: Transformations in the Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement after World War I’, Diplomatic History 43, no. 2 (2019): 265–281.

17 Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference Edinburgh 1910 (Cambridge, MI: Erdmans, 2009); Dana L. Robert, ‘The First Globalisation. The Internationalisation of the Protestant Missionary Movement Between the World Wars’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 26, no. 2 (April, 2002): 50–66.

18 Christopher H. Evans, The Social Gospel in American History (New York: New York University Press, 2017); Robert, American Women, 285–288.

19 Stanley, World Missionary Conference, 132–141.

20 Wendy J. Deichmann Edwardsand Carolyn de Swarto Gifford, Gender and the Social Gospel (Chicago: University of Illinois, 2003), 3.

21 Stanley, World Missionary Conference, 309–10.

22 Jennifer Bond, ‘Inculcating a Gendered Christian Internationalism: The Chinese Student YWCA’, Journal of Women’s History 35, no. 1 (2023): 34–56; Boyd, Nancy, Emissaries The American YWCA (New York: YWCA, 1986); Ian Tyrrell, ‘American Protestant Missionaries, Moral Reformers, and the Reinterpretation of American “Expansion”, in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Outside In: The Transnational Circuitry of US History, eds. Andrew Preston and Doug Rossinow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017): 96–122; Ian Tyrrell, ‘New Approaches to American Cultural Expansion’, in Competing Kingdoms 3–66; Ian Tyrrell, ‘Vectors of Practicality. Social Gospel, the North American YMCA, and the Global Context’, in Spreading Protestant Modernity: Global Perspectives on the Social Work of the YMCA and YWCA, 1889–1970, eds. Harald Fischer-Tiné, Stefan Huebner and Ian Tyrrell (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021); Margaret Mih Tillman, ‘Mediating Modern Motherhood: The Shanghai YWCA’s “Women’s Work for Women”, 1908–1949’, in Spreading Protestant Modernity 119–144; Angela Woollacott, ‘From Moral to Professional Authority. Secularism, Social Work, and Middle-Class Women's Self-Construction in World War I Britain’, Journal of Women's History 10, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 85–111; Jun Xing, Baptized in the Fire of Revolution. The American Social Gospel and the YMCA in China 1919–1937 (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1986).

23 Mary S. Sims, The Natural History of a Social Institution. The YWCA (New York: Woman’s Press, 1936); Paddle, ‘For the China of the Future’, 325–341.

24 Lian Xi, ‘The Search for Chinese Christianity in the Republican Period (1912–1949)’, Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 4 (2004): 851–898.

25 Catriona Beaumont, ‘“Fighting for the Privileges of Citizenship”: The Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), Feminism, and the Women’s Movement 1928–1945’, Women’s History Review 23, no. 3 (2014): 463–479.

26 Aihua Zhang, ‘Chinese Christian New Women’s Practicality, Social Service, and Broad Cooperation: a Case Study of YWCA Women in the 1920s and 1930s’, Christianity and the Modern Woman in East Asia, ed. Garrett L. Washington (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 38–61.

27 Ian Tyrrell, Woman's World, Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 81–113; Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America's Moral Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 28–49; James Keating, Distant Sisters: Australasian Women and the International Struggle for the Vote, 1880–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2020), 28–63.

28 Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck, eds. Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 10.

29 Barbara Reeves-Ellington and others, ‘Introduction’, in Competing Kingdoms, 1–16.

30 Jane Haggis and Margaret Allen, ‘Imperial Emotions: Affective Communities of Mission in British Protestant Women’s Missionary Publications c1889–1920’, Journal of Social History 41, no. 3 (2008): 691–796.

31 Patricia Grimshaw and Peter Sherlock, ‘Women and Cultural Exchanges’, in Missions and Empire, ed. Norman Etherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Patricia Grimshaw, ‘Faith, Missionary Life, and the Family’, in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship, 2007).

32 Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice (London: Routledge, 2019).

33 Ruth A. Miller, ‘The Missionary Narrative as Coercive Interrogation: Seduction, Confession and Self-presentation in Women’s “Letters home”’, Women’s History Review 15, no. 5 (2006): 751–71.

34 Amy Moore, Three Score Years and Ten.

35 Amy Weir to Mabel Weir, 20 September 1929.

36 Stanley, World Missionary Conference, 310–17.

37 Marjorie Theobald, Knowing Women: Origins of Women’s Education in Nineteenth-Century Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Judith Bessant and Bob Bessant, The Growth of a Profession: Nursing In Victoria 1930s–1980s (Bundoora: La Trobe University Press, 1991).

38 David D. Parker, ‘Theological and Biblical College Education in Australia: An Evangelical Perspective’, Journal of Christian Education 86, no. 7 (1986): 5–18.

39 Amy Weir to Mabel Weir, 13 December, 1929.

40 B. B. Darling, ‘Nash, Clifford Harris (1866–1958)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: Australian National University, 1986.)

41 Amy Weir to Mabel Weir, 20 September 1929.

42 Amy Weir to Mabel Weir, 2 December 1929.

43 Amy Weir to Mabel Weir, 4 May, 1930.

44 Amy Weir to Mabel Weir, 6 February, 1930.

45 Amy Weir to Mabel Weir, 16 February, 1930.

46 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 2 March 1931.

47 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 8 April, 1930.

48 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 2 March 1931.

49 Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 32–64.

50 Frank Houghton, China Calling (London: Inter-Varsity Fellowship of Evangelical Unions, 1936), 114; Alwyn Austin, China’s Millions. The China Inland Mission and Late Qing Society, 1832–1905 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007); Marshall Broomhall, The Jubilee Story of the China Inland Mission (London: China Inland Mission, 1912); Marcus L. Loane, The Story of the China Inland Mission in Australia and New Zealand 1890–1964 (Sydney: China Inland Mission, Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1965); Phillip Brotchie, ‘The Contribution of Australians to the China Inland Mission in 1888–1953’ (PhD diss., Deakin University, 1999); Rhonda Semple, Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism, and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission (Rochester: Boydell Press, 2003), 197–206.

51 James Hudson Taylor, China her Needs and People (London: China Inland Mission, 1887).

52 Email communication from Frank Moore, 8 August 2021.

53 Alwyn Austin, China’s Millions, 241–49.

54 Linda Benson, Across China’s Gobi. The Lives of Evangeline French, Mildred Cable, and Francesca French of the China Inland Mission (Manchester: Eastbridge, 2008).

55 Valerie Griffiths, Not Less Than Everything. The Courageous Women Who Carried the Christian Gospel To China (Oxford: Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 2004), 135–157.

56 Griffiths, Not Less Than Everything, 103–131.

57 Brotchie, Australian Missionaries, 179–180.

58 Directory of Protestant Mission in China in the Order of Missions in the Various Stations in each Province (Shanghai: North China Daily News and Herald, 1936), 28.

59 China’s Millions 60, no. 12 (1934): 237.

60 Semple, Missionary Women, 154–189.

61 Sue Grunewold, ‘Competing Models at the Door of Hope Mission in Shanghai’, in Competing Kingdoms, 195–217.

62 Mildred Cable, ‘The Ministry of Women in the Chinese Church’, Chinese Recorder 53, no. 2 (1922): 118–120.

63 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 20 January, 1932.

64 Amy Weir to Mabel Weir, May 24, 1932 – 29 October, 1932.

65 China’s Millions 55, no. 12 (1929): 190.

66 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 10 March, 1934.

67 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 17 June, 1935.

68 China’s Millions 59 (1933): 91, 196, 207; 60 (1934): 64–65, 84–86,113, 144–149; 61 (1935): 7–8, 47–48, 209, 214.

69 China’s Millions 59, no. 10 (1933): 187.

70 Amy Weir to Mabel Weir, 15 July, 1933.

71 W. H. Warren, ‘Our Shanghai Letter’, China’s Millions 61, no. 8 (1935): 152–154; Ryan Dunch ‘“Mothers to Our Country”: Conversion, Education, and Ideology among Chinese Protestant Women, 1870–1930’, in Pioneer Chinese Christian women: Gender, Christianity, and Social Mobility, ed. Jessie G. Lutz (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2010), 324–350.

72 Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory, 28.

73 Jiang Chunjiao and Mao Pengcheng, ‘The Fate of Traditional Schools in a Context of Educational Modernisation: the Case of Si-shu in China’, History of Education Review 50, no. 1 (2021): 39–53.

74 Paul J. Bailey, Gender and Education in China: Gender Discourses and Women's Schooling in the Early Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2007).

75 Elizabeth R. VanderVen, A School in Every Village: Educational Reform in a Northeast China County, 1904–31 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2011), 101–124; Kate Merkel-Hess, The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Meimei Wang, Bas Van Leeuwen, and Jieli Li, Education in China 1840-Present (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 63–76.

76 Amy Moore to Mabel Mercer, 7 May, 1934.

77 Valerie Griffiths, ‘Bible Women from London to China: The Transnational Appropriation of a Female Mission Idea’, Women’s History Review 17, no. 4 (2008): 521–541.

78 Teaching Comparative Religion reflected the recommendations of the 1910 World Missionary Conference. Thanks to one anonymous reviewer for this point.

79 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 12 January, 1938.

80 Idabelle Lewis Main, ‘Neighbourhood Schools’, Chinese Recorder 38, no. 1 (Oct 1936): 633–645.

81 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, October 15, 1935.

82 Hersatter, Gender of Memory 16, 99–102; Meimei Wang, Education in China, 71.

83 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, October 15, 1935.

84 For debate on links between colonialism and literacy see Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid, ‘Introduction’, Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below 2013; Ruth Compton Brouwer, ‘Margaret Wrong's Literacy Work and the “remaking of woman” in Africa, 1929–48’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 23, no. 3 (1995): 427–452; Stanley, World Missionary Conference, 183–7.

85 Maria Jaschok, ‘Chinese “Slave” Girls in Yunnan-Fu: Saving Chinese Womanhood and Western Souls 1930–1991’, Women and Chinese Patriarchy. Submission, Servitude and Escape, eds. Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994): 171–195.

86 For the internationalist debates on ‘slave girls’ see Sarah Paddle, ‘The Limits of Sympathy’, 2–22.

87 Johanna Ransmeier, ‘Body-Price. Ambiguities in the Sale of Women at the end of the Qing Dynasty’, in Sex, Power and Slavery, eds. Gwyn Campbell and Elizabeth Elbourne (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), 319–44.

88 Hunter Jane, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 128–173; Patricia R. Hill, The World Their Household. The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1985); Helen M. Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2008).

89 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 5 November, 1934.

90 Connie Shemo, ‘Wants Learn Cut, Finish People: American Missionary Medical Education for Chinese Women and Cultural Imperialism in the Missionary Enterprise, 1890s–1920s’, Chinese Historical Review 20, no. 5 (2013): 54–69.

91 China’s Millions 61 (1935) 109.

92 Arthur Moore, ‘The Work in South Shensi’, China’s Millions 61, no. 4 (1935): 73–4.

93 Houghton, China Calling, 143–4.

94 Yue, Isaac, ‘Missionaries (Mis-)Representing China: Orientalism, Religion, and the Conceptualisation of Victorian Cultural Identity’, Victorian Literature and Culture 37, no. 1 (2009): 1–10.

95 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 29 April, 1933.

96 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 7 May, 1934.

97 Bryna Goodman, Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Exchange in Late Imperial and Modern China (Lanham: Rowman and Little, 2005); Michelle Tien King, Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). Ma Ling, ‘Bringing the Law Home: Abortion, Reproductive Coercion, and the Family in early Twentieth-Century China’, Women’s History Review 30, no. 8 (2021): 990–1008.

98 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 17 March, 1933.

99 Beverley Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Bryna Goodman, ‘“A World of Concubines”: Fissures in the Category of “Woman” in Republican China’, Journal of Women’s History 32, no. 2 (2020): 85–110.

100 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 24 May, 1932.

101 Alvyn Austin, China’s Millions, 241–49.

102 Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds. Opium Regimes: China, Britain and Japan 1839–1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Kathleen L. Lodwick, Crusaders against Opium: Protestant Missionaries in China, 1874–1917 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009): 160–165; James L. Hevia, ‘Opium, Empire and Modern History’, China Review International 10, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 307–326.

103 Alan Baumler, ‘Citizenship, the Nation and the Race: China and the International Opium System, 1912–1931’, Frontiers of History in China 13, no. 3 (2018): 330–354.

104 China’s Millions 60, no. 10 (October 1934):192.

105 China’s Millions 60, no. 6 (June, 1934):74,106.

106 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 8 July, 1946. Houghton, Frank, China Calling, 62.

107 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 6 December, 1932.

108 Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates, Bound Feet, Young Hands: Tracking the Demise of Footbinding in Village China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017); Angela, Zito, ‘Bound to be Represented: Theorising/Fetishing Footbinding’, Embodied Modernities: Corporality, Representation and Chinese Cultures, ed. Fran Martin and Lanssa Heinrich (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2006), 21–41; Hill Gates, Footbinding and Women's Labor in Sichuan (London: Routledge, 2015).

109 Hershatter, Gender of Memory, 41–45.

110 Susanna Ashton, ‘Compound Walls: Eva Jane Price’s Letters from a Chinese Mission, 1890–1900’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 17, no. 2 (1996): 82–83.

111 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 11 February, 1948.

112 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 10 February, 1944.

113 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 20 October, 1941.

114 Amy Moore, Three Score Years and Ten, 183.

115 Hershatter, Gender of Memory, 156–158. Tina Phillips Johnson, Childbirth in Republican China: Delivering Modernity (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011); Ling Ma, ‘Bringing the Law Home’, 990–1008.

116 Frank Moore footnote on letter, 20 October, 1940.

117 Semple, Missionary Women, 154–89.

118 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 5 November 1943.

119 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 19 August, 1941.

120 Jonathan Spence, To Change China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 183.

121 Jessie Gregory Lutz, ed. Pioneer Chinese Christian Women: Gender, Christianity, and Social Mobility (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2010); Xi Lian, The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907–1932 (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Xi Lian, Redeemed by Fire: the Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

122 Li Danke, ‘Popular Culture in the Making of Anti-imperialist and Nationalist Sentiments in Sichuan’, Modern China 30, no. 4 (2004): 470–505.

123 Rey Chow, ‘Violence in the Other Country’, 81–100.

124 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 10 March, 1944.

125 James L. Hevia, ‘Leaving a Brand on China. Missionary Discourse in the Wake of the Boxer Rebellion’, Modern China 18, no. 3 (1993): 304–332.

126 A. E. Small, ‘What of the Future of China?’ Chinese Recorder 72, no. 3 (1941): 134.

127 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 11 February, 1948.

128 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 5 May, 1932.

129 Ruth Frencham, ‘A Great Deliverance’, China’s Millions 61, no. 7 (1935); S.C. Frencham, ‘In the Hands of the Communists’, China’s Millions 61, no. 9 (1935): 164–166.

130 Amy Moore to Mabel Weir, 9 June, 1935.l

131 Penny Edmonds, Intimacies of Violence, 6.

132 Joanna Cruickshank, White Woman, 2.