Yun Zhou: The Woman's Messenger: Evangelical Literature and the Missionary Movement in Republican China.University Park: Penn State University Press,2025; pp. 232.

Yun Zhou's The Woman's Messenger provides a fascinating insight into Republican China at a pivotal time of gender relations, religious development, political instability and emerging nationalism. Scholarship on Republican China, the Civil War and the early years of the CCP has often addressed how women's roles developed, however, Zhou's study on the role of Christianity sheds new light on the dynamics of gender during this period. By following the Christian women's magazine Nü duo, Zhou outlines how women's roles developed in relation to Nü duo's influence, not simply rehashing the long-discussed societal and cultural shifts for women at this time, from the ‘Modern Girl’ to wartime victim or warrior. Instead, Zhou's book cohesively considers what factored into these gendered developments and how ideas about femininity had to interact with a fraught political landscape. The book is structured into four chapters taking a chronological approach to the assessment of Nü duo from the 1910s until the early 1950s. Zhou reconstructs the characters of the main editors, American missionary Laura White, her mentee Li Guanfang and another student, Liu Meili, a former indentured servant-turned-convert, showing how the magazine became, over time, more of a voice for agentic Chinese Christian femininity than a leftover of Victorian missionaries. Ideas surrounding women's agency and idealisation are presented in The Woman's Messenger, showing how Christianity had a role in shaping women's identity in the post-Qing period. As Nü duo was a magazine initially founded by missionaries, it brought Victorian values of female domesticity to China and initially promoted ‘divine domesticity underpinned by gendered theology’ (p. 30). Zhou succeeds in using each chapter to show how ideas of domesticity developed, from the Victorian values based on Western Christian women in Chapter 1, to the promotion of Chinese social equality and welfare as examined in Chapter 3 Zhou clearly outlines the necessary fluidity of Chinese womanhood in relation to growing ideas of modernity and nationalism at this time, but also shows how Christian ideas of femininity could also shift and transform in relation to broader political changes. As such, it is clear to see that the book does not simply present these transformations as rejections of previous ideas, but rather how they could be reshaped and repurposed for the relevant context. Zhou shows Nü duo's awareness that women could not simply abandon domesticity, but that domesticity could be a vehicle for both Christianity and modernity. This book also provides another insight into the complex history of the relationship between China and Christianity. Chapter 2's discussion on the complex disassociation of Confucianism from the family and the promotion of Christian family roles that had to be adapted to conflate with the new ideas of the family in Republican China (p. 72). Zhou shows how Christianity could be utilised to bring about and maintain social reform, arguing that Christian ideas of domestic duty could pave the way for nationalist and patriotic virtue. As such, she stresses the significance of the importance in flexibility of Chinese Christianity in the face of upheaval and changes in regime, such as the Japanese invasion during the 1930s. This flexibility is outlined through her discussion on Nü duo; however, the significance of the magazine and printed media for Christianity as opposed to the missionary work itself could have been developed further. What did printed word offer the people of China, most of whom were illiterate? There was certainly a sense of the importance of class and knowledge within this book, the editors who are the protagonists of this study were all educated women, but this is somewhat implicit at times. Nü duo's target readership could be described more overtly to show how more and more Chinese women are engaging with transformative Christianity in China. The Woman's Messenger provides an alternative lens through which politics, modernity and the cultivation of nationalism can be viewed. Christianity's relationship with Chinese thought has always been temperamental and Zhou shows the consciousness of Nü duo's editors to project modernity through tradition, for example, in the late 1930s, there was an increased publication of real issues facing women, such as child rearing, as opposed to the promotion of idealism (p. 128). Nü duo's interaction with political and nationalist thought is discussed throughout this book, yet until the last few pages of Chapter Four, the reception of Nü duo within Chinese politics at the time is seldom explored. A scholar of Republican China may question what nationalists thought about Nü duo, the extent to which its ideals of domesticity and equality were deemed a threat or welcomed. While Zhou's discussions of columns outlining personal stories do convey Nü duo's broader interaction with its readership, but there is less of a sense of Nü duo's position or broader role within Republican China. Zhou concludes, ‘Women's negotiation and discussion of where they belonged, in terms of society, politics, and religion, attests to an ongoing search for their place in the modern world that went beyond the family domain’ (p. 171). Her study through the lens of Nü duo provides an alternative gendered history. While many women's histories of Republican China consider top-down ideological change and its social implications, The Woman's Messenger instead shows that women themselves negotiated with these ideological shifts in relation to their own longstanding traditions of domesticity. Zhou's text is accessible to the general readership because of this approach, yet scholars of Republican China will also see the nuances in how these women's stories and influences are so closely tied with the importance of political action and ideas of nationhood outlined by important men of the period from Sun to Mao. Overall, this book commendably relays the complexity and nuances of gender relations and Christianity in the backdrop of Republican China. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.