Redemption and Revolution

In the early twentieth century, a good number of college-educated Protestant American women went abroad by taking up missionary careers in teaching, nursing, and medicine. Motoe Sasaki's transnational history of these New Women explores the intersections of gender, modernity, and national identity within the politics of world history.

Motoe Sasaki is Associate Professor on the Faculty of Intercultural Communication at Hosei University.

Sasaki demonstrates that American and Chinese New Women struggled to make sense of how they were markers of their respective nations' progress.

Sarah M. Griffith:

Sasaki's research provides new insights into the complex forces guiding both American missionary women and Chinese New Women across the first half of the twentieth century. The author adds to a growing body of scholarship that challenges critics of cultural imperialism who tend to paint American missionary women as little more than extensions of the nation-state, capitalism, and Western imperialism.... Rich in research and sharp in its analysis, Redemption and Revolution adds to our understanding of the complex and often conflicted relationships American missionary women had with the nation-states they represented abroad.

K. E. Stapleton, State University of New York at Buffalo:

In the 1920s, educated Chinese women increasingly felt called on to contribute to national salvation, even if it meant abandoning the ideals championed by their 'imperialist' American teachers. Sasaki focuses on women's higher education, particularly nursing. Her stimulating conclusion considers how the Cold War erased memories of earlier American and Chinese women's transculturation. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries.

Arif Dirlik, author of Culture and History in Postrevolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity:

Motoe Sasaki's account of the U.S. missionary enterprise in China around the turn of the twentieth century is informed by the insights of recent scholarship on gender, cultural relations, and global modernity. U.S. and Chinese 'new women’ shared common assumptions about progress and civilization but brought local concerns and sensibilities to their search for modernity. ‘New women’ in the United States who found an outlet in missionary activity were products of the turn-of the-century search for a unique but universalist imperial U.S. modernity. Xin nüxing in China sought in modernity answers to their concerns for China’s survival. Their voices would fade from memory by the 1930s, both in the United States and China, with the ascendancy of masculinized paradigms of world history.

Kristin Hoganson, author of Consumers’ Imperium:

A revealing account of the politics of missionary-Chinese encounters, Redemption and Revolution shows how U.S. missions became anticolonial flashpoints—even among missionaries' closest Chinese associates. Drawing on extensive research in U.S. and Chinese sources, Motoe Sasaki delves into the day-to-day frictions of cross-cultural encounters and the wider conflicts they sparked. More than a story of anticolonial nationalism in the face of cultural change, this is a story of patriarchal politics, anticapitalism, and self-doubt.