This dissertation explores how specific actors such as French Catholic missionaries of the Missions Etrangères de Paris (MEP) translated and disseminated the universality of the Christian message into the particular context of northeast China from the 1830s to the 1930s, and how Chinese Catholic converts, especially, female converts, interpreted and transformed the Catholic faith as a language to articulate an awareness of self.
It is the focus of this chapter to examine who Bible women were, why they were needed, what role they played in the Chinese church in the late Qing period, particularly from the 1860s to 1911, and how they overcame both their own limitations and those restrictions imposed on women by the various Protestant denominations.