Book Review: "Women, Religion, and Space in China: Islamic Mosques & Daoist Temples, Catholic Convents AND Chinese Virgins," By Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun.
This study focuses on women's religious organizations in Henan province, specifically in the cities of Kaifeng and Zhengzhou and the rural town of Jin'gang. The fates of women's mosques in Kaifeng and Zhengzhou, the Daoist Jiuku Temple in Kaifeng, and Catholic convents and lay celibates in Kaifeng and Jin'gang are traced from the late Qing period to the present day. The authors' key argument is that in the twentieth‐century religious institutions continued to provide alternative spaces to Chinese women otherwise restricted to the domestic sphere. While this function has been recognized for, say, pre‐nineteenth century period pilgrimage associations, vegetarian halls, and Buddhist and Daoist nunneries, historians and activists of twentieth‐century feminism have tended to focus on the secular sphere as the key arena of the struggle for gender equality, either disregarding the religious realm or seeing it as hopelessly entangled with patriarchy. Jaschok and Shui's case studies seek to counter this reactionary image by emphasizing the active potential of religious institutions to create alternative spaces for women even in the midst of Republican‐period modernization drives, and perhaps especially in the context of a Communist state nominally supportive of gender equality while at the same time tending to subordinate women's spaces and choices to the prerogatives of ideology and production. In this way, this book makes a major contribution to Chinese religious and women's studies. My only quibble concerns the sometimes idiosyncratic translations of Chinese terms and phrases, which for the reader are difficult to evaluate as virtually no Chinese characters are provided—an unjustifiable omission in this age of digital word‐processing.
