In
The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China, Jane Hunter argues that women missionaries in turn-of-the-century China were able to use missionary work to greatly expand women's sphere even as they supported submissive roles for women and lived relatively circumscribed lives at the mission. Hunter accesses this paradoxical construction of American womanhood in China primarily via the letters and private papers of some 40 female missionaries from different denominations who worked in China from 1900 to 1922, when some 60% of Protestant missionaries in China were women. She also includes information from interviews and the archives of two mission boards. Because their status as outsiders in Chinese culture throws the missionaries' gender norms in high relief, the book highlights the feminization of Protestantism and the ways in which American womanhood intersected with work, religion, and cross-cultural exchanges.
