Western Women Missionaries and their Japanese Female Charges, 1870–1890

Abstract

In the past ten years much research has been published on the issue of nineteenth‐century Western women (missionaries) and their imperialist attitudes toward the Asian populations they came in contact with when they travelled to, or were sent by the missions to proselytise in China, India or Korea. The author discusses the relationship between Western women missionaries and Japanese girls during the 1870s and 1880s, focusing in particular on the educational work undertaken by women missionaries and on the values they tried to impart to Japanese girls in the girls’ schools they founded. The author shows that women missionaries could not easily discard the patriarchal and imperial notions they had come to believe in. She also argues, however, that the environment they created in Japan helped some girls to voice their hopes for a society in which their understanding of Japanese women’s worth was recognised.