This dissertation presents a social and cultural history of Chinese Buddhist women in the first half of the twentieth century. It demonstrates that Buddhist women were active not only in traditional settings such as monasteries and nunneries, but also in new settings such as Buddhist associations, lay groups for both genders, laywomen’s groups, women’s Buddhist academies, and Buddhist periodicals. They were not only donors, ordinary participants, and audience members, but also managers, staff members, and authors. Previous scholarship has focused on the activism of student-nuns and the establishment of women’s Buddhist academies, both of which have been interpreted by some scholars as influenced by, or as forms of, feminism. As well, previous scholarship tends to contrast the engaged and activist women with ordinary laywomen and nuns. The latter are then depicted as less socially engaged and subsumed within male-dominated society or as the target of modernization efforts. This dissertation, primarily drawing on records from Republican Era (1912–1949) Buddhist periodicals, supplemented by archives, newspapers, personal writings, and oral histories, reveals what is lost when evaluating the lives of nuns and laywomen through the lens of modernization or feminism. For example, it reveals that the establishment of women’s Buddhist academies in Wuhan was not an activist nuns’ movement per se but a joint effort of the reformist monk, Taixu (1890–1947), student-monks, laymen and laywomen, and student-nuns. Activism expressed by student-nuns, too, was not framed as a feminist statement but as a call to pursue religious fulfillment. Ordinary laywomen were not confined to their private spheres but actively engaged in promoting Buddhism. The mainstream Buddhist community recognized that laywomen could serve as Dharma-propagators and professional women, and were not limited to the roles of wives and mothers. Ordinary nuns were perceived by Buddhists at the time with their specific evaluation systems rather than with simple labels of corrupt, conservative or reformist. The less-activist ordinary good nuns were widely praised. Even though they were rarely involved in projects of modernization, their lives—shaped by multiple social factors of the time—formed part of the Buddhist landscape of the new era.
Sunminghui Wang (Thu,) studied this question.