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In the early twentieth century, a good number of college-educated Protestant American women went abroad by taking up missionary careers in teaching, nursing, and medicine. Most often, their destination was China, which became a major mission field for the U.S. Protestant missionary movement as the United States emerged to become an imperial power. These missionary women formed a cohort of new women who sought to be liberated from traditional gender roles. As educators and benevolent emancipators, they attempted to transform Chinese women into self-sufficient middle-class professional women just like themselves. As Motoe Sasaki shows in Redemption and Revolution, these aspirations ran parallel to and were in conflict with those of the Chinese xin nxing (New Women) they encountered.