Girls' Mission Schools by the Canadian Woman's Missionary Society in Szechwan (Sichuan), 1894-1952

摘要

The Woman's Missionary Society of Canadian Methodist Church (the United Church of Canada since 1925) started its educational work in Szechwan (Sichuan) from the very beginning of its mission work, setting up schools for girls and young women. The work in the first period was slow in progress and experimental in nature because of the distrust and suspicion from the native people. Mission education for girls received a boost in the second period, with boarding schools and day schools founded in all 9 stations and a complete educational system established leading from kindergartens up to a women's college at West China Union University. After China gradually achieved autonomy in education and required mission schools to get registered in 1920s, mission education for girls in Sichuan entered its third period, shifting its focus from primary schools to the training of Christian leaders among women. The WMS's mission schools in Sichuan functioned primarily as a media to spread Christianity, attract converts among native females (school girls and their mothers), and eventually to Christianize Chinese homes and even China. The single women missionaries kept to their Victorian values and aimed mainly to prepare their pupils for their place at home as partners to their future husbands and mothers to the next generation. But mission schools did offer girls an opportunity to learn about a different style of life and enabled them to look at their own social and economic positions in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th China. Mission schools for girls encouraged a measure of individualism and a spirit of scientific inquiry by providing some science courses. The girls and young women, looking up to their missionary teachers as role models, began to thinking of creating a career in public social life, leading an independent life for themselves. In this sense, WMS mission schools for girls contributed to helping modernize Sichuan, or even China.