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Piety, Professionalism and Power: Chinese Protestant Missionary Physicians and Imperial Affiliations between Women in the Early Twentieth Century
Author(s) -
PripasKapit Sarah
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
gender and history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-0424
pISSN - 0953-5233
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0424.12129
Subject(s) - piety , protestantism , power (physics) , filial piety , citation , history , classics , religious studies , sociology , law , philosophy , gender studies , political science , physics , quantum mechanics
Like many other white Protestant women physicians around the turn of the twentieth century, Mary McLean hoped to practise her chosen profession in Asia. She and her sister presented themselves as candidates for missionary work before the interdenominational China Inland Mission Board in 1904. However, the mission’s physician believed that McLean’s heart condition would be aggravated by China’s climate. The sisters spent several months in Shanghai testing the physician’s pronouncement. After this trial period they were forced to concede that McLean’s health did indeed suffer in China. They concluded that God had not intended for them to work as missionaries. Yet they still wanted to help the cause of Protestant missions. In lieu of becoming missionaries themselves, they determined to help a Chinese Christian girl receive a medical education. Through missionary contacts in Shanghai, they found Tsao Liyuin, a young teacher interested in the McLeans’ proposal. Tsao came to the United States with the sisters’ support in 1905, entered the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP) in 1907 and graduated in 1911. She was the third Chinese woman to graduate from the College and later became one of many Chinese women in the employ of US-based missionary organisations.1 McLean’s health prevented her from engaging in missionary work directly, but in Tsao she found a suitable, if unexpected, proxy. This article takes as its starting point the life trajectories of WMCP’s first three Chinese graduates: Hu King Eng, Li Bi Cu and Tsao, all of whom earned medical degrees in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century before returning to China to carry out medical missionary work. The physicians’ lifelong involvement with US-based missionary activities, and their unusual position as highly-educated Chinese women who assumed authority and visibility within American missionary circles, render them significant subjects in exploring both the possibilities and the limitations of women’s missionary networks. Although exceptional figures, Hu, Li and Tsao are representative of a cohort of secondand third-generation Protestant