Women reaching women in China
The vision for zenana work expanded to include the women of China. As in India, it began to be recognised that for Chinese women to be reached, female workers would need to be sent.
The lives of Chinese women were in need of Christ’s love and power. Many baby girls were thrown alive into the terrible ‘baby towers’ (vessels for the uncoffined corpses of infants) or were seen floating down the rivers. Girls who were brought up by their families were uneducated and left crippled by foot-binding (the process of breaking the toes and bandaging them under the foot, resulting in three inch ‘lotus’ feet, a symbol of beauty and status linked to social mobility). Unable to read or write, they were left to menial duties. Married very young, a girl began womanhood at the mercy of her mother-in-law. It was not until she had sons and became a mother-in-law herself that she assumed any responsibility as an individual. Women would not leave the house for years, the chief object of their lives, under a constant sense of fear, to avert calamity in their family by ceaseless ancestral worship.
Even in the China Inland Mission chapels, where women were admitted, they had separate entrances, large separating screens, and were excluded from the classes taught by men. In fact, when one of the BMS missionaries, Rev Farthing, encouraged some Chinese men to share what they had heard with their wives, they replied that it was ‘utterly useless, as women were too stupid to understand or receive it’. Their need was indeed great.
The first unmarried women mission workers to be sent out to China were Miss Agnes Kirkland and Miss Lucy Shalders in 1893. They were based in the town of Tsing-Chou-Fu, in the province of Shantung (today known as Shandong). The first obstacle for these two women was the Chinese language. They spent many months in language training, a complicated task as Miss Shalders recounted in 1895:
"The language here certainly is difficult, not from its form, but its pronunciation. It is only a work of time to get one’s sounds correct, an upward or downward inflection of the voice making every difference to the meaning. I can now read John’s gospel through; but not intelligibly to a woman who is quite a stranger to me, I fear.
Miss Kirkland and two Bible-women, 1911
Miss Kirkland experienced a slow start to her work, learning to speak the language, and suffering from Shanghai fever in 1895. It took her about a year to fully recover, but soon she was able to start the work she went out to China to do.
"Breakfast over, with a crowd of children following us eager to give information and to answer questions, we take a look at the hills by which we are surrounded. Soon we are invited into a court-yard, when Lui-ta-sao takes the opportunity of letting them hear the message we have come to bring them. Some of the women, by their faces and also the expressions they use, give me to know they do understand in some measure the importance of this truth we want to teach them about.
Evidence of changed lives can be seen in an address given in 1898 by Mrs Moir Duncan – a zenana worker for eight years in China – as she described the women in a village in which she had been working:
"Their feet are unbound, for nobody feels comfortable now in the gospel village with bound feet….Get into conversation with the old lady, and what will you hear? Well, she can tell you gruesome tales of famine, floods, pestilence, wolves, superstitions and idolatries, but I think you will find she prefers to speak of her Lord, the gospel, the Church, and perhaps her latest evangelistic efforts…
The Boxers – so named because of their use of martial arts, and after a mistranslation of the society’s name as the ‘Fists of Righteous Harmony’ – were against all foreign influence, from trade to missionaries, and many Christian converts were killed.
Bessie’s death, and the deaths of many other missionaries during the Boxer Rebellion, signalled the temporary withdrawal of zenana workers from China. It wasn’t until 1902 that they were able to resume work in Shandong, and much later in other provinces.
Boxer Rebel
Bessie Renaut's story
The Boxer Rebellion
Women in mission
BZM in Congo