“A Hewer of Wood and Drover of Water”: Expectations of Protestant Missionary Women on the Western Frontiers of Canada and the United States, 1830–1900

Abstract

Between 1820 and 1900, women represented approximately thirty per cent of the missionaries sent to western Canada, the majority married to other missionaries. During the same period, women comprised sixty per cent of the Protestant mis­sionaries sent to Indian missions in the western United States.1 Over half of the women in US mission work were single and unrelated to other members of the mission.2 To the male-dominated Protestant missionary societies, women repre­sented the embodiment of Christian womanhood: pious protectors of home, hearth, and the private sphere. But missionary women viewed their role differ­ently. Better educated than the average woman in Canada or the United States, and often more educated than their male counterparts, females joined the mis­sionary movement because missionary societies portrayed their work as a liberat­ing and more public extension of Christian womanhood (Wills 253–55).3Therefore, missionary women hoped to use their education to advance Christian­ity and to extend the role of the Christian woman. Once they arrived on the fron­tier, though, they found that mission work offered simply the same traditional roles of wife, helpmate, mother, and nurse but in a different locale. By examining Protestant missionary societies’ expectations for women and missionary women’s own expectations of mission work, this paper studies how missionary women struggled with these expectations when they conflicted with actual experience on the frontier. It compares female and male missionaries’ descriptions of native women to examine the conflicts in missionary women’s lives.