Based on extensive oral history interviews, Dreaming the New Woman uncovers the experiences of girls who attended missionary middle schools in Republican China in the first half of the twentieth century. Chinese missionary schoolgirls were often labelled "foreign puppets" or seen as passive recipients of a western-style education. By focusing on the pupils' own perspectives and drawing on seventy-five oral history interviews conducted with missionary school alumnae, alongside student writings, missionary reports, and newspaper sources, this fascinating book provides fresh insights into what it meant to be Chinese, female, and Christian during the first half of China's turbulent twentieth century. The oral history interviews show how missionary schoolgirls weathered periods of anti-Christian hostility, experimented with new gender roles at school, experienced the Second Sino-Japanese War in Shanghai, and applied Christianity to the Communist cause after 1949. Jennifer Bond reveals how
Awkwardness offers an account of the psychology and philosophical significance of a ubiquitous social phenomenon. Our aversion to awkwardness mirrors our desire for inclusion. This explains its power to influence and silence us: as social creatures, we don't want to mark ourselves as outsiders. As a result, our fear of awkwardness inhibits critique and conversation, acting as an impediment to moral and social progress. Even the act of describing people as "awkward" exacerbates existing inequities, by consigning them to a social status that gives them less access to the social goods (knowledge, confidence, social esteem) needed to navigate potentially awkward situations. Awkwardness discusses how we ostracize and punish those who fail to fit into existing social categories; how we all depend on--and are limited by--social scripts and norms for guidance; and how these norms frequently let us down when we need them. But awkwardness has a positive side: it can highlight opportunities for m
