Abstract This paper studies the missionary women colleges from 1900s to 1930s from a gender’s angle. It describes and reveals the situation of the missionary women colleges development, and how the cultural and educational environment influenced the students’ way of thinking and doing during the complex historical changes in China at that time. It aims to find the complicated relationship among education, culture, the society and the living conditions of the woman students. The paper begins with the analysis of teachers’ sexual distinction and identity, by talking about the special schooling and cultural circumstance of the missionary women colleges. We can learn how special cultural connotation and teachers’ contradictory roles of sexual distinction reflected in the educational aims and contents, and how the above factors affected the students’ behavior. Then we discuss in detail how the woman students pursued for the new living style with their subjective consciousness and insistence on independence.
