Evangelizing “Home”: Laura M. White’s Translation and Intellectualizing of Home Economics in China (1891–1931)

Since the late Qing, Christianity helped reconfigure China’s modern intellectual landscape not simply by importing “Western knowledge” but by constructing the epistemic frameworks through which knowledge was named, classified, and circulated. This article examines how the Christian idea of “homemaking” was scientized through translation and became jiazheng (家政, Home Economics) in Republican China, emerging as a new discipline within women’s education. It centers on Laura Marsden White (1867–1937), an American Protestant missionary and pioneer of women’s education who founded China’s first Christian women’s monthly, Nüduo (The Woman’s Messenger, 1912–1951) and initiated its jiazheng column as an institutional infrastructure for domestic science knowledge. Foregrounding White as a missionary–translator and translingual mediator, this study argues that her work participated in the construction of modern home economics rather than merely transmitting a ready-made field. Strategically aligning her translation with Confucian gendered ethics, White rendered home economics intelligible as jiazheng while simultaneously reorganizing household practices into a systematic, science-based curriculum. By circulating scientific knowledge, standardized curricular categories, and credentialed forms of expertise, White recast women’s domestic responsibilities as socially recognized knowledge and employable labor. Her translation offered Chinese women a historically specific route into schooling, writing, and public service, allowing them to negotiate the traditional gender divide without abandoning the culturally legible language of the family. Translation thus serves as both a medium of Protestant moral pedagogy and an engine of disciplinary formation and gendered social change.