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| True Womanhood and Protestant Missionary Women's Professional Positioning in China |
| ZHU Hua |
| College of Foreign Studies at Shanghai Ocean University, Shanghai 201306, China |
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Abstract The cult of "True Womanhood" was an ideology of women's identity in Victorian America with four parameters——piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity, by which women were discursively excluded from the public sphere. However, encouraged by the church, many educated protestant women managed to infiltrate into the semi-public sphere of foreign mission, breaking through the gendered divide. When the missionary women adapted to a Chinese context, they strategically changed the weight of all the parameters of the "True Womanhood" and reshaped their professional positions, which in turn helped them achieve their social value while the old male-female functional structure within the missionary field was maintained.
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2014, Vol. 0 
