Christianity And The Modern Woman In East Asia

These chapters examine pathbreaking East Asian women who mobilized Christian beliefs, knowledge, institutions, and networks between 1880 and 1945 to raise the profile of “The Woman Question,” frame the contours of the related debate, and craft original responses.

Gender in Modern East Asia explores the history of women and gender in China, Korea, and Japan from the seventeenth century to the present. This unique volume treats the three countries separately within each time period while also placing them in global and regional contexts. Its transnational and integrated approach connects the cultural, economic, and social developments in East Asia to what is happening across the wider world. The text focuses specifically on the dynamic histories of sexuality; gender ideology, discourse, and legal construction; marriage and the family; and the gendering of work, society, culture, and power. Important themes and topics woven through the text include Confucianism, writing and language, the role of the state in gender construction, nationalism, sexuality and prostitution, New Women and Modern Girls, feminisms, "comfort" women, and imperialism. Accessibly written and comprehensive, Gender in Modern East Asia is a much-needed contribution to the study of the region.

The on-going reconfiguration of geo-political and economic forces across the globe has created a new institutional and moral environment for East Asian family life and gender dynamics. Indeed, modernisation in East Asia has brought about increases in women’s education levels and participation in the labour force, a delay in marriage age, lower birth rates, and smaller family size. And yet, despite the process of modernization, traditional systems such as Confucianism and patriarchal rules, continue to shape gender politics and family relationships in East Asia. This book examines gender politics and family culture in East Asia in light of both the overwhelming changes that modernization and globalization have brought to the region, and the structural restrictions that women in East Asian societies continue to face in their daily lives. Across three sections, the contributors to this volume focus on marriage and motherhood, religion and family, and migration. In doing so, they reveal how actions and decisions implemented by the state trigger changes in gender and family at the local level, the impact of increasing internal and transnational migration on East Asian culture, and how religion interweaves with the state in shaping gender dynamics and daily life within the family. With case studies from across the region, including South Korea, Japan, mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, gender studies, anthropology, sociology and social policy.

By exploring the interplay among gender, religion, and modernity, this book exposes the part Chinese Christian women played in China’s quest for a strong nation in general and in Republican Beijing’s modern transformation in particular. Focusing on the Beijing Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the author examines how the Association, guided by the Christian tenet “to serve, not to be served,” tailored its Western models and devised new programs to meet the city’s demands. Its enterprises ranged from providing women- and child-oriented facilities to promoting constructive recreational activities and from reforming home and family to improving public health. Through an analysis of these endeavors, the author argues that the Chinese YW women's contribution to the city's modernity was a creative embodiment of the then socially targeted missionary movement known as the Social Gospel. In the process, they demonstrated their distinctive new ideals of womanhood featuring practicality, social service, and broad cooperation. These qualities set them apart from both traditional women and other brands of the New Woman. While criticized as trivial, their efforts, however, pioneered modern social service in China and complemented what municipal authorities and other progressive groups undertook to modernize the city.

A half century after its founding in London in 1844, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) became the first NGO to effectively push a modernization agenda around the globe. Soon followed by a sister organization, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), founded in 1855, the Y movement defined its global mission in 1889. Although their agendas have been characterized as predominantly religious, both the YMCA and YWCA were also known for their new vision of a global civil society and became major agents in the worldwide dissemination of modern “Western” bodies of knowledge. The YMCA’s and YWCA’s “secular” social work was partly rooted in the Anglo-American notions of the “social gospel” that became popular during the 1890s. The Christian lay organizations’ vision of a “Protestant Modernity” increasingly globalized their “secular” social work that transformed notions of science, humanitarianism, sports, urban citizenship, agriculture, and gender relations. Spreading Protestant Modernity shows how the YMCA and YWCA became crucial in circulating various forms of knowledge and practices that were related to this vision, and how their work was co-opted by governments and rival NGOs eager to achieve similar ends. The studies assembled in this collection explore the influence of the YMCA’s and YWCA’s work on highly diverse societies in South, Southeast, and East Asia; North America; Africa; and Eastern Europe. Focusing on two of the most prominent representative groups within the Protestant youth, social service, and missionary societies (the so-called “Protestant International”), the book provides new insights into the evolution of global civil society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its multifarious, seemingly secular, legacies for today’s world. Spreading Protestant Modernity offers a compelling read for those interested in global history, the history of colonialism and decolonization, the history of Protestant internationalism, and the trajectories of global civil society. While each study is based on rigorous scholarship, the discussion and analyses are in accessible language that allows everyone from undergraduate students to advanced academics to appreciate the Y movement’s role in social transformations across the world.

Christians have never constituted one percent of Japan’s population, yet Christianity had a disproportionately large influence on Japan’s social, intellectual, and political development. This happened despite the Tokugawa shogunate’s successful efforts to criminalize Christianity and even after the Meiji government took measures to limit its influence. From journalism and literature, to medicine, education, and politics, the mark of Protestant Japanese is indelible. Herein lies the conundrum that has interested scholars for decades. How did Christianity overcome the ideological legacies of its past in Japan? How did Protestantism distinguish itself from the other options in the religious landscape like Buddhism and New Religions? And how did the religious movement’s social relevance and activism persist despite the government’s measures to weaken the relationship between private religion and secular social life in Japan? In Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan, Garrett L. Washington responds to these questions with a spatially explicit study on the influence of the Protestant church in imperial Japan. He examines the physical and social spaces that Tokyo’s largest Japanese-led congregations cultivated between 1879 and 1923 and their broader social ties. These churches developed alongside, and competed with, the locational, architectural, and social spaces of Buddhism, Shinto, and New Religions. Their success depended on their pastors’ decisions about location and relocation, those men’s conceptualizations of the new imperial capital and aspirations for Japan, and the Western-style buildings they commissioned. Japanese pastors and laypersons grappled with Christianity’s relationships to national identity, political ideology, women’s rights, Japanese imperialism, and modernity; church-based group activities aimed to raise social awareness and improve society. Further, it was largely through attendees’ externalized ideals and networks developed at church but expressed in their public lives outside the church that Protestant Christianity exerted such a visible influence on modern Japanese society. Church Space offers answers to longstanding questions about Protestant Christianity’s reputation and influence by using a new space-centered perspective to focus on Japanese agency in the religion’s metamorphosis and social impact, adding a fresh narrative of cultural imperialism.

The ‘spatial turn’ of missionary places Situated at the crossroads of missionary history, imperial history and colonial architecture, this volume examines the architectural staging and spatial implications of the worldwide expansion of Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By focusing on specific architectural fragments, analysing the intersection of Christian edifices in colonial and traditional urban settings or unravelling the social understanding of missionary places, each chapter strives to understand the agency of missionary spaces. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and fields, this book aims to centre those missionary spaces by approaching them not merely as décor around and within which the missionary encounter was acted, but by making them part and parcel of it. Through its approach, Missionary Spaces provides a new paradigm for scrutinising the ‘spatial turn’ for missionary histories and contributes to the increased attention across the humanities to space, place, and location since the late 1990s. Space does not occur as an historical given, but as a social construction to be analysed, while at the same time having explanatory value of its own. This book focuses on Africa and the Chinese Region with contributions on Burundi, China, Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, and Taiwan.

This critical survey of Asian christologies focuses on the need to recognize and end the oppressed condition of Asian women. Orevillo-Montenegro shows how the christologies brought to Asia by Western missionaries failed to take into account the reality of Asia with its great diversity of cultures and traditional religions.