Missionary families: Race, gender and generation on the spiritual frontier by Emily J. Manktelow

Abstract

Reviewed by: Missionary families: Race, gender and generation on the spiritual frontier by Emily J. Manktelow Jane Samson Missionary families: Race, gender and generation on the spiritual frontier By Emily J. Manktelow. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Published in the prestigious "Studies in Imperialism" series, where an emphasis on the cultural histories of empire has always been to the fore, Emily Manktelow's important contribution reflects recent interest in missionary families as sites of historical investigation. Her thorough and imaginative use of London Missionary Society (LMS) official records, as well as private papers, have generated two principal questions: What were the ideal families promoted by the society's leadership, and how were actual missionary families formed and sustained during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Manktelow provides brief introductions to the geographical contexts of her study: the LMS headquarters in London, the "South Seas Mission" founded at Tahiti, and the "South African Mission." Along with a chronological account of major events and personalities involved in the founding of her sample missions, Manktelow provides some very welcome illustrations and family trees designed to invite the reader into the family circles explored later in the book. Her comparative method works well, primarily because she focuses so clearly on a single society, the LMS, and on missionary self-understandings. To have included substantial analysis of these understandings in the context of a range of different Indigenous cultures would have disrupted the book's clarity. Others might disagree, but I believe that we do not yet know enough about the complexity of missionary self-understandings, especially when developed in tension with metropolitan expectations and directives. Manktelow's detailed, well-researched analysis takes up several themes: missionary wives, marriage in the mission context, families, mothers and fathers, mission children, and second-generation missionaries. She emphasises "the perception of isolation and distance" on early mission stations that made early mission families "completely formative in the practice and evolution of mission" (16). Although parts of her introduction read like press promotions—"an ever-intriguing, fascinating and imaginatively inspiring aspect of the cultural history of mission" (16)—there is no doubt that Manktelow is correct to underline the importance, and the historiographical neglect, of missionary families. Two of her topics have generated particularly pioneering insights. One concerns mission marriages and parenting strategies, where she pays particularly close attention to male missionaries. Mission families were intended to be role models for gendered cultural change in Indigenous societies, but historical research has tended to focus on mission women. Manktelow produces powerful insights from her archival sources, showing us loving and unloving husbands, sexual demands met and unmet, and (mostly) demonstrative and committed fathers. In other words, male missionaries deserve the further deconstruction of their stereotypes as much as their womenfolk. Missionary men often had to deliver their own children in the early days, tending to ailing wives or children during frequent illness, cooking, and decorating their homes alongside their wives. "The missionary husband came to understand that his role was quite distinct from that of husband in Britain" (82). From this perspective, Manktelow is able to shed new light on the famously unhappy marriage of Mary and David Livingstone, concluding that Mary's agency should not be so quickly brushed aside by historians eager to underline the conventional image of Livingstone as selfish, even brutal, in his pursuit of missionary glory. A focus on missionary children opens up fresh perspectives on the institutional dynamics of the LMS and its resistance to the idea of responsibility for mission families. Crucial here was the society's 1818 resolution establishing the principle of "mission first; family second" (40). This view was at odds with the priorities of missionaries in the field and their supporters in Britain. A public campaign led to the establishment of a fund for missionary widows and orphans in 1824 and, eventually, schools in London for missionary children in 1838 and 1842. However, this warm public support never entirely prevailed upon the LMS to see mission families as central to their enterprise. By the later nineteenth century, single women and single men were being recruited for the mission field where established hospitals, schools and Indigenous clergy were becoming focal points...