BALDWIN, Esther E., as Mrs S. L. Baldwin.

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The Chinese Book of Etiquette and Conduct for Women and Girls Entitled Instructions for Chinese Women and Girls. First edition, first printing, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the first blank, "To my friend Mrs Oliver Crane from Esther E. Baldwin, 1218 Pacific St, Brooklyn, Jan. 1902". Crane was an accomplished musician, a keen traveller, and a member of several New England societies, including the American Oriental Society.Esther E. Baldwin (1840-1910), known to contemporaries as the "Chinese Champion" because of her advocacy for Chinese immigrants in the United States, served in Fuzhou as a missionary throughout the 1860s and 1870s. In The Chinese Book of Etiquette, she offered the first adaptation into English of the Nu Jie by Ban Zhao (c.45-120 CE), a leading Han dynasty literatus. The daughter of the court historian Ban Biao, Ban enjoyed a privileged education at a time when the majority of Han women were not given formal tutoring in the classics. Her Nu Jie, written to prepare her daughters and nieces for life, was a cornerstone of Confucian thought for 2,000 years. Drawing from ideas contained in the Confucian Li Ji (Classic of Rites), it stressed the virtues of obedience and self-sacrifice: "All girls, everywhere, first should learn to cultivate virtue. Of cultivating virtue's methods, the most important is to be pure and upright in morals" (p. 1). After the death of her brother, Ban Gu, Ban completed his Han Shu (Book of Han), the standard official hist

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