People · social reformer, head of the Municipal Council's Industrial and Social Division
Eleanor Mary Hinder
辛德Xīndé · 1893–1963
Australian social reformer who studied women and child factory workers and in 1933 became head of the Municipal Council's Industrial and Social Division.
Eleanor Mary Hinder (辛德, Xīndé) was the Shanghai Municipal Council’s specialist on industrial labour in the 1930s. She was Australian, educated in Sydney, and first saw Shanghai’s factories in 1924 while travelling to a conference in Norway.
She came back in 1926 at the invitation of the Chinese YWCA to run a two-year welfare study of women and children, paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation, and returned again in 1930. In 1931 the Shanghai employers’ federation hired her to advise on the new national Factory Law. In 1933 the Council created an Industrial and Social Division and made her its head; in 1940 it became a department. The gazetteer calls her the only woman among the Council’s senior staff.
When the Pacific War began she handled food rationing for a time. In August 1942 she was sent out of Shanghai on the exchange ship to Madagascar and later worked for the ILO, UNRRA and the United Nations. She died in 1963.