Female Missionaries Research Articles

Hélène de Chappotin (1839—1904) et les Franciscaines missionnaires de Marie, “Oser sa vie.” (review)

Hélène de Chappotin (in religious life, Marie de la Passion), foundress of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary and a candidate for beatification, was fond of saying that she had the blood of Dominic de Guzman flowing through her veins. This bit of family history probably gave her a strong sense of historical-rootedness. But it also likely helped her to face a host of personal challenges, including the untimely death of her mother (precipitated by her decision to enter religious life), conflicts she had with superiors when she directed Reparatrice convents in India, and her decision to found a new religious order. The reward today, almost one hundred years after her death, is a thriving international religious society that counts 8,200 female missionaries of seventy-two different nationalities, at work on all continents, in a total of seventy-six countries.

‘Soldiers of Christ’? Images of Female Missionaries in Late Nineteenth‐Century Britain: Issues of Heroism and Martyrdom

‘Soldiers of Christ’? Images of Female Missionaries in Late Nineteenth‐Century Britain: Issues of Heroism and Martyrdom

“A heart that has felt the love of god and longs for others to know it”: conventions of gender, tensions of self and constructions of difference in offering to be a lady missionary

The article is based on a detailed study of the applications of female candidates who applied to the London Missionary Society for consideration as missionaries to serve in the foreign field, from 1875 to 1900. Drawing on the candidates' own letters, formal applications and the selection process as revealed in the archives of the Ladies' Committee of the Society, the article describes the process of professionalisation of the female missionary's role during this period. A textual analysis reveals how this process of professionalisation negotiated the boundaries of gender and class in late nineteenth-century England, maintaining a conventionality through the religious rubric within which the offer to be a lady missionary was constructed. Critical to this religiosity and its ability to twin convention with iconoclasm was the discursive presence of the imperial and colonial other. The article also reflects on themethodological issues of interpreting and re-presenting the narratives of the past from a secular feminist contemporary location.

‘Ordinary Events of Nature and Providence’: Reconstructing Female Missionary Experience in the British West Indies, 1800‐45

‘Ordinary Events of Nature and Providence’: Reconstructing Female Missionary Experience in the British West Indies, 1800‐45

The female body, missionary and reformer: the reconceptualization of femininity in modern China

The female body, missionary and reformer: the reconceptualization of femininity in modern China

Homosexuality in Women: Considerations for Evangelical Missionary Recruitment, Missions Administration, and Clinical Intervention

Evangelical mission organizations are dealing increasingly with in-service female missionaries or with female missionary applicants who present with a variety of homosexual experiences and orientations. Because missions is a character profession and missionaries are religious ministers as well as professional persons, homosexual behavior requires an organizational response. This article discusses causes of homosexual orientation from a developmental perspective. Implications of this perspective are explored, with a continuum of homosexual behavior presented, accompanied by suggested administrative approaches.

Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa Whitman by Julie Roy Jeffrey

Reviews 247 Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa Whitman. By Julie Roy Jeffrey. (Norman, Oklahoma: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. 256 pages, $24.95.) Converting the West narrates the life of Narcissa Prentiss Whitman (18081847 ). In mid-March, 1836, Narcissa and her husband Marcus left Pittsburgh with a mission party, led by Marcus, headed to the Oregon Territory. After a decade’s Presbyterian missionary work with the Cayuse Indian tribe in the pacific Northwest, Marcus and Narcissa were murdered in the Indian massacre at their station, at Waiilatpu. Narcissa proved the only woman in the community slain during this massacre. Her life “back East” is adequately sketched by Professor Jeffrey, but the biography really becomes interesting once the party crosses the mid-continent. As a female missionary, asJeffreyjustly observes, Narcissa understood “she had become a public figure of sorts and that her correspondence would not be private.”In analyzing these letters,Julie Royjeffrey has done admirable work in plumbing the seeming meanings of the omissions, as well as the inclusions. In this vein, the author provides keen insights into the relationship be­ tween Narcissa and Marcus. Analogously, the hardships and illnesses alluded to and the hesitations and doubts hinted at in Narcissa’s letters ProfessorJeffrey “fleshes out” sensibly and convincingly. In conveying a sense of the western adventure portion of Narcissa’stoo-brief existence, the author presents another admirably strong and sensitive American woman of the kind hitherto pre­ sented, in epistolary format, by Lydia S. Lane in I Married a Soldier [(1893). University of New Mexico Press, 1987] and by Elinore Pruitt Stewart in Letters of a Woman Homesteader [(1914). Houghton Mifflin, 1982]. When Narcissa’s only child dies, she “takes in” and helps raise the orphan children of the Sager family, one of many good deeds performed by the Whitmans for the commu­ nity—“whites” and Indians alike—for which they evidently received, at best, scant gratitude. The build-up to and the aftermath of the massacre Jeffrey presents with especial skill— multum in parvo. Concerning these incidents, she makes efficient use of the understandably meager sources to present the drama in aptly muted tones. The selection of maps and photographs adds tang and interest to this quietly moving biographical narrative. JAMES KIRSCHKE Villanova University ...

Missionary Assessment: Norm Comparison and Prediction of Perseverance

Two studies which used personality tests to differentiate between successful and unsuccessful missionaries were reviewed. In the present study, the scores for 64 (32 male and 32 female) missionaries (mean age 30. 2) on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), Sixteen Personality Factors Questionnaire (16PF), and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) were analyzed. The missionary sample's MMPI scores differed from those of the standardization sample on most subscales (p <. 01). The missionaries also differed from the national norms on 10 of the 16PFfactors (p <.05). The perseverers (those who were still in the field) differed from the nonperseverers (those who came home early) on 16PFfactors N p<. 05) and Q2 (p <.05). Four 16PFfactors were found to predict perseverance/nonperseverance (p <. 05).

Counting the Cost of Faith. America's Early Female Missionaries

America's first unmarried female missionaries, women who went out to Asia and Africa in the early to middle nineteenth century, chose lives as intense and demanding as any man's. They chose the foreign mission vocation despite the belief, strong in their era, that women should accept the constraints and comforts of their “proper sphere,” the home. To make their decision, these women struggled with two sets of ideas which coexisted in tension: equality of all persons before God, and the ideology of “woman's sphere.” As persons of faith they could respond to God's commands in the same way as men without theological challenge, because equality of all persons before God was a major strand in their Christian tradition. As nineteenth-century women, however, they were asked to accept lowered status and protective restrictions, in keeping with woman's sphere ideology. These women chose to become missionaries, compromising on second-class status and protective restrictions. In their view, the missionary vocation was worth the cost of compromise.

Timid Girls, Venerable Widows and Dignified Matrons: Life Cycle Patterns Among Organized Women in New York and Boston, 1797-1840

with fruitful ground for research. Not only do organizations offer visible evidence of women's historical activity, their existence challenges the notion that nineteenth-century society successfully excluded women from the public realm. In mining the records of national groups like the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Young Women's Christian Association and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, historians have shown how their organizations enabled women to have considerable impact on American public life in the post-Civil War decades. Although the pre-Civil War years have attracted somewhat less historical attention, researchers have begun to investigate the myriad local groups founded in the early nineteenth century, uncovering layers of local organizational activity existing before the formation of better-known national groups. Through town and city studies, historians have shown how antebellum groups-including women's missionary societies, Sunday schools, orphanages, daycare centers and old-age homes-provided social welfare services along with spiritual uplift to needy urban residents.' Close investigation of these societies' rhetoric and programs, as well as of their membership, has clarified our understanding both of the organizations and of the women who ran them. Recent research has, for example, identified at least three separate women's organizational traditions in the early nineteenth century: benevolence, reform, and feminism. Benevolence, the earliest tradition, began at the turn of the century with missionary and orphan asylum societies and grew throughout the antebellum years as women formed groups designed both to meliorate social ills and to diffuse religion among poor city-dwellers. Thus the New York and Boston Female Missionary Societies not only raised money to

Subcutaneous Nodules as a Manifestation of Onchocerciasis

Although infection with tissue nematodes is a significant health problem in many parts of the world, such cases are unusual in the continental United States. This report describes a case of Onchocerca volvulus infection, acquired by a 38-year-old female missionary in northern Brazil, that manifested as subcutaneous nodules in the groin and flank two years after the patient's return to the United States. A year previously, a wrong diagnosis of Wuchereria bancrofti was made at biopsy. At that time, treatment with diethylcarbamazine citrate had to be discontinued because of intense pruritus. Examination of a wet saline impression smear of a new biopsy specimen showed the adult worms to have regularly arranged outer annular ridges, which, together with the pruritus after treatment with diethylcarbamazine (a positive Mazzotti test), led to the diagnosis of onchocerciasis. Retreatment with diethylcarbamazine again caused pruritus, but this was tolerated as were subsequent treatments.