Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 16:1 (Winter 2002)
Article: Women and the Church in China: With the gospel, missionaries brought new status to Chinese women.
Author: Cecilia Yau

PP 14:1 (Winter 2002) p. 18

Women and the Church in China: With the gospel, missionaries brought new status to Chinese women.

Cecilia Yau

Cecilia Yau serves with the Chinese Christian Mission in California. She is the author of five books, including A Passion for Fullness. The material in this article was presented at the Global Celebration for Women last fall in Dallas.

For most of the 5,000 years of Chinese history, women were deprived of basic human dignity, and they were under various kinds of oppression.

Before the nineteenth century, a Chinese woman’s life was wrapped around three men: father, husband, and son. The famous “Three Submissions” taught that a woman should follow and obey her father while still young, her husband after marriage, and her eldest son when widowed. “A woman married is like a horse bought; you can ride it or flog it as you like,” says a Chinese proverb. Widows with no sons could not inherit property; sons alone could continue the family lineage and fulfill the duties of ancestral worship. Sons stayed within the family and worked for the honor and prosperity of the family. In contrast, daughters were money-losing goods. In desperate times they were the ones to be sold, abandoned, or even drowned—but never the sons.

The highest virtue of women was submission to men; their best display of character was fidelity. While men were allowed to have wives and concubines, women were required to be faithful to their husbands unto death, and sometimes in a literal sense.

A woman was considered a heroine if she refused to remarry after her husband died, even if it meant she would starve to death. (Because women were not allowed to work and make money, a widow had no means of support if she had no sons.) Beginning in the Sung Dynasty, around a.d. 979, widows were encouraged to pursue fidelity with religious zeal by self-mutilation or suicide.

Young girls were also expected to receive mutilation: the foot-binding that had been perpetuated for a thousand years. Girls as young as three or four years of age were forced to go through this painful and cruel ritual. The toes of both feet would be bent inward, and a piece of cloth would be forcibly wrapped and bound around the feet to stop their growth. With bones crushed and skin torn apart, the feet would bleed profusely. The girls would then be restrained from going outdoors; they were to be confined to the domestic sphere. This practice originated with a king who liked to watch a court dancer performing with bound feet. From that time on, men insisted that foot-binding was a womanly thing to do, and it became a criterion for a woman’s marriageability.

Women were not only deprived of economic and physical freedom, they were also dis...