Free Love and Free Marriage: Chinese Writers’ Description and an American Missionary Woman’s Prescription in the 1920s

Abstract

May Fourth Chinese intellectuals celebrated women’s free choice of partners as one of the Western notions closely tied to gender equality and modernity. Previous studies have shown that The Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi, 1915–1931) championed freedom of love, marriage, and divorce under Zhang Xichen’s (1889–1969) editorship from 1921 to 1925. This chapter introduces an underexplored perspective on these issues from Laura M. White (1867–1937), the founding editor of The Woman’s Messenger (Nüduo, 1912–1951) and a Protestant American missionary woman. In her twin roles as an educator and an editor in China since 1891, she wrote numerous articles to teach Chinese women certain Western concepts on womanhood she perceived suitable for them. When the Chinese yearned for Western models to emulate, American missionary women such as White, who closely interacted with Chinese women, might have been viewed as exemplars. However, this chapter illustrates that White’s ideas were much more conservative than the Western ideas reformist writers had described. By juxtaposing the concepts of love and marriage prescribed by an American missionary woman with those described and campaigned by Chinese writers, predominantly male intellectuals represented by Zhang Xichen, this study aims to portray how Chinese women were positioned as the subject of this dynamic discussion of conjugal relationships from two groups other than themselves in the rapidly changing social and cultural landscapes of the 1920s.