ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the efforts of American missionary women in China, the largest foreign mission field, to transform the lives of Chinese women through educational institutions. "Women's work for women" was a major force in the nineteenth-century American foreign missionary movement. In the nineteenth century, most American missionaries could see no good influence of Chinese religions on their followers. Americans' sense of spiritual superiority required a "supremely positive view" of Christianity and negative views toward other religions. The fundamental test of the sincerity of religious conversion, especially in the eyes of nineteenth-century missionaries, was "idol smashing." Educational, medical, and other humanitarian reform institutions such as missionary women typically established were controversial among male missionaries during the nineteenth century, as American Protestant churches divided into a "two-party system" along evangelical and social service lines. The end result of missionary women's efforts railed to strike the middle ground between traditional patriarchy and modern Western feminism.
