ABSTRACT
Westerners have long been fascinated by the Chinese family and Chinese women, though the approaches they have brought to these topics have naturally changed over time. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, missionaries emphasized the features of the Chinese family that stood in contrast to Western practices, such as ancestor worship, legally recognized concubinage, and large multigenerational families with several married brothers living together. Many were reformers at heart and took up the cause of the subjection of women. They wrote with feeling of the plight of girls who might be killed at birth by parents who did not need another daughter, who could be sold at 5 or 6 as indentured servants, whose feet were bound so small that they could hardly walk, who were denied education, who had to marry whomever their fathers chose, who had few legal rights to property, who could be divorced easily and denied custody of their children, and who might be pressured not to remarry after their husbands’ deaths.
