Women Missionaries Research Articles

“That's the Modern Girl”: Missionary Women and Modernity in Kolkata, c. 1907 - c. 1940

In 1923, three young single western women—Margaret Read, Iris Wingate, and Eleanor Rivett—made an adventurous summer trip riding and trekking from Kalimpong in West Bengal, right up to Sikkim. Read and Wingate, both wearing riding breeches and with hair bobbed, were somewhat more adventurous, continuing their trip to Tibet. This was a holiday from their work in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), the great cosmopolitan city of the British Raj in India. Surely these independent and mobile women were reminiscent of “the Modern Girl” that has been “singled out as a marker of ‘modernity’”. However, these women were not in the sites where “the Modern Girl” has hitherto been located, for they were working in the Christian missionary movement in India. Eleanor Rivett, an Australian and the oldest in the trio, was principal of United Missionary Girls High School (UMGHS) while Iris Wingate and Margaret Read, both British, were working with the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in Kolkata.

“To Save the Women of China from Fear, Opium and Bound Feet”: Australian Women Missionaries in Early Twentieth-Century China

This article explores the experiences of Western women missionaries in a faith mission and their relationships with the women and children of China in the early years of the twentieth century. In a period of twenty years of unprecedented social and political revolution missionaries were forced to reconceptualise their work against a changing discourse of Chinese womanhood. In this context, emerging models of the Chinese New Woman and the New Girl challenged older mission constructions of gender. The Chinese reformation also provided missionaries with troubling reflections on their own roles as independent young women, against debates about modern women at home, and the emerging rights of white women as newly enfranchised citizens in the new nation of Australia.

Chronic Microsporidial Enteritis in a Missionary from Mozambique

Microsporidiosis often occurs in immunocompromised persons but may also occur in those who are immunocompetent. Infection by Microsporidia involves a variety of organs and systems, most notably, intestine, lung, kidney, brain, sinuses, muscle, and eyes. Enterocytozoon bieneusi and Encephalitozoon intestinalis are associated with gastroenteritis, and Enterocytozoon hellem and Encephalitozoon cuniculi are associated with keratoconjunctivitis. We report a case of chronic microsporidiosis in a 28-year-old woman missionary from Mozambique who came to our diagnostic laboratory with nausea, lower abdominal pain, and frequent bowel movements. Over two years, the patient was clinically assessed and treated for malaria and giardiasis without laboratory diagnosis while in Mozambique. Identification of the causative agent of her condition was not attempted during the course of her illness in Mozambique. Furthermore, adverse effects of malaria and giardiasis medications may have exacerbated the chronic illness in this patient and mimicked chronic microsporidiosis.

"You Have Been Very Thoughtful Today": The Significance of Gratitude and Reciprocity in Missionary-Hawaiian Gift Exchange

In October 1819 the first company of American missionaries set sail for the Hawaiian Islands with the express intent of converting its inhabitants to Christianity. The missionaries earnestly believed that they might provide Hawaiian Islanders with the dual gifts of civilization and salvation and were eager to set about the work of bestowing them. Missionaries were surprised to discover that Hawaiians had gifts of their own to bestow, interrupting the missionary agenda almost from the moment of their arrival. Exploring the unspoken and often symbolic language of gifts, this article offers a re-examination of early Hawaiian-missionary contact to argue that Hawaiian and missionary women—who situated themselves at the very center of the exchange of things—were powerful figures in this missionary and colonial drama.

Book Review: Women in Mission: From the New Testament to Today

Book Review: Women in Mission: From the New Testament to Today

The Smithsonian Institution's exhibit fossil preparation lab Volunteer Training Programme, part II: Training and evaluating student preparators

In November and December of 2008, the National Museum of Natural History hosted a training course for instruction of paleontological preparation methods in order to build a large pool of volunteers for the FossiLab public exhibition. Through a grant from the Smithsonian Women's Committee, the Department of Paleobiology funded four weeks of intensive, hands-on training for a group of 29 volunteers in moulding, casting and fossil preparation methods. Contracted instructors worked with institutional staff to create a curriculum for training specific tasks, as well as to create general knowledge of preparation methods. Classes consisted of lecture, demonstration, and hands-on components. Instructors monitored the students throughout the instruction period, and concluded the programme with written and practical examinations. The instructors provided written evaluations for each student and presented recommendations for placement with specific tasks within the department. After the conclusion of the programme students retained much of their instruction and have gone on to successfully keep the preparation laboratory staffed while preparing fossils for the visiting public.

The Smithsonian Institution's exhibit fossil preparation lab Volunteer Training Programme. Part I: Design and recruitment

The Smithsonian Institution, through a grant from the Smithsonian Women's Committee, implemented a programme during the fall and winter of 2008 to teach the basics of mechanical fossil preparation, moulding and casting to individuals seeking to work as volunteer preparators in the National Museum of Natural History's exhibit preparation lab, called FossiLab. Four outside preparators were contracted to conduct the instruction; two instructors taught two five-day sessions on molding and casting and two other instructors taught two six-day sessions on preparation. The Department of Paleobiology's (Paleobiology) curatorial staff instructed the groups in paleobotanical preparation and microfossil processing and picking. All instruction took place in FossiLab during public hours. Registration for the programme was conducted via the department's web page where a detailed description of the work and the lab familiarized prospective students with the type of work they would be performing. They were also asked a series of selfevaluative questions in an attempt to filter out those who might not have the innate motor skills or temperament needed for the job. Those who were confident in their decision to volunteer were interviewed in FossiLab, and the majority of those then registered for the programme. Twenty nine people, some new and some experienced, were trained. FossiLab is now staffed each day by as many as six volunteer preparators who perform a variety of tasks for Paleobiology. The number of weekly person-hours has tripled since the training. Continued, focused training on individual projects is carried on by the Vertebrate Paleontology Preparation Laboratory staff. Eighteen hours of videotape was recorded during the training and will be edited and made available via DVD and the internet.

Book Review: Awakening the Hermit Kingdom: Pioneer American Women Missionaries in Korea

Book Review: Awakening the Hermit Kingdom: Pioneer American Women Missionaries in Korea

Book Review: Awakening the Hermit Kingdom: Pioneer American Women Missionaries in Korea

Book Review: Awakening the Hermit Kingdom: Pioneer American Women Missionaries in Korea

“We Wia Ragai”: Missionary Collection and Synergetic Assemblages in the Solomon Islands 1920–1942

An entry in Edith Safstrom’s diary, We Wia Ragai, marks her first posting to the girl’s mission school in the Solomon Islands, and is a Mota phrase told to her by lay missionary colleague, Ida Wench. The phrase essentially means “it is good to be here among you all” and echoed Edith’s thoughts on life at the school on tiny Mbungana Island. The Safstrom collection of artifacts held in the Museum of Victoria and Edith’s diaries unwrap a synergetic dialogue between lay missionary women and Indigenous women and children. The collection circumscribes a lay missionary’s collective experience of Christianity and acceptance of Indigenous cultural heritage from 1921 to 1942 in the Solomon Islands.

Psychiatrist Sees Her Heroism as Just Doing ‘Right Thing’

Psychiatrist Sees Her Heroism as Just Doing ‘Right Thing’

The Missions Theology Of Early Pentecost: Call, Challenge, and Opportunity

AbstractThis article explores three historical components of Pentecostal theology that influenced Pentecostal missionary women by examining missions after the Pentecostal revival of the early twentieth century. This article presents four case studies of such Pentecostals and their responses to Pentecostal experiences and missionary careers for ongoing theological consideration about what it means to 'Go into all the world' as a Pentecostal. According to this study, the Pentecostal experience and reliance on the Holy Spirit was a significant part of Pentecostal women's call to and empowerment for missions, in facing the challenges of missionary service with Pentecostal eschatology, and in following the biblical mandate and narrative to serve in the power of the Spirit with gospel proclamation and accompanying 'signs and wonders'.

“Providence Has Freed Our Hands”: Women's Missions and the American Encounter with Japan. By Karen K. Seat. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. xvii + 193 pp. $22.95 cloth.

“Providence Has Freed Our Hands”: Women's Missions and the American Encounter with Japan. By Karen K. Seat. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. xvii + 193 pp. $22.95 cloth.

A liberalisation of Irish social policy? Women’s organisations and the campaign for women police in Ireland, 1915–57

For much of the twentieth century, Ireland was quite unusual in comparison with other western European nations in its exclusion of women from policing. By the time women were allowed to join the national police force, the Garda Síochána, in 1957, women were already established in the police forces of Britain, Germany and France, as well as that of Northern Ireland. Further afield, women were already employed in police forces in Poland, New Zealand and the U.S. The appointment of women police was a major demand of feminists, moral campaigners and social reformers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all of whom sought better protections for women. As in the U.K., U.S. and many European countries, women’s organisations in the Irish Free State were to the forefront of the debate over the need for women police. Beginning with the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association (I.W.S.L.G.A.) in 1915, women’s organisations such as the National Council of Women, Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers (J.C.W.S.S.W.), and the Catholic Women’s Federation campaigned relentlessly for nearly half a century in the face of governmental indifference and obstruction. When the first class of ‘experimental’ women police emerged in 1958 from the Garda training college in Templemore, County Tipperary, women’s organisations hailed it as a victory.

Book Review: Women In Mission: From the New Testament to Today

Book Review: Women In Mission: From the New Testament to Today

“Wise Mother, Good Wife”: A Transcultural Discursive Construct in Modern Korea

Abstract The article investigates the genealogies of “wise mother and good wife,” arguably the most influential gender ideology in modern Korea. Approaching it as a product of transcultural encounters in turn of the twentieth-century Korea, the article examines the ways in which Korea’s Confucian-prescribed gender norms were refashioned and reconstituted under the influence of the ideology of domesticity promoted by American Protestant women missionaries and the Meiji gender ideology of ryōsai kenbo, which transpired through Japanese colonial policies in Korea. I argue that the modern construct of “wise mother and good wife” ideology was the latest form of patriarchal gender arrangements designed to meet new challenges in the modern era. I further argue that this modern ideal of womanhood was both oppressive and liberating in the sense that it continued hierarchical gender practices of the past, and yet it also enabled women to carve out new space for power and authority within the circumscribed conditions.

“Women of Conscience” or “Women of Conviction”? The National Women's Committee on Civil Rights

This paper explores the history of the National Women's Committee on Civil Rights (NWCCR). Called into being at the behest of President Kennedy, the NWCCR was an attempt to enlist the support of the organized women of America in the advancement of civil rights. The NWCCR had two main goals: first, to offer support for the passage of Kennedy's civil rights legislation, and second, to encourage their branch membership to work in support of integration. However, whilst the majority of the NWCCR's affiliated organizations had passed resolutions in favour of integration both throughout the United States and within their own organization, in practice they were reluctant to threaten the internal stability of their associations by insisting on either integrated membership or active support of civil rights in the local community. This article will argue that whilst the NWCCR were successful in organizing lobbying for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they were unwilling to throw their weight behind efforts to encourage activism in local communities. Whilst key members of the NWCCR saw an important role for women in the implementation of civil rights at the community level, they were forced to conclude that the organizational structure and ethical inertia of the NWCCR did not make it a suitable medium for furthering racial justice.

Gender, Power and Voice in South African Anglicanism: The Society of Women Missionaries’ Journal, 1913–1955

ABSTRACT Compared with the Nonconformists, the anglican Church in South africa employed a surprisingly large number of single women missionaries in evangelistic, educational and medical work among blacks in the first half of the twentieth century. Looking at three watershed moments, this article offers a preliminary assessment of the organisation which they set up for mutual learning and support. It analyses the report of the founding conference of the Society of Women Missionaries in 1913 alongside copies of the SWM Journal from their 1937 zenith and 1955 closure. the women's assessment of their place in the gendered ecclesiastical hierarchy is explored first. Changing power relations among black and white churchwomen are then suggested by the growth of African female agency, while differences in interactions with white society are also glimpsed over time. Finally, the devastating impact of apartheid policy on mission work in the 1950s demonstrates how the adverse political context was further acting to silence the voice of women missionaries, necessitating fresh ways for Christian women to advance their faith in South africa.

Assessing Women, Gender, and Empire in Britain's Nineteenth‐Century Protestant Missionary Movement

AbstractAlthough women constituted the majority of British missionary labor by the turn of the twentieth century, they were largely discounted from the official record of mission work – a silence that until recently has been preserved by women's history, mission history, and imperial history. Over the past two decades, new historical and interpretive frameworks have brought into clearer focus the role of women missionaries and the gendered fabric of the ‘civilizing mission’ in evangelistic, colonial, and feminist projects. Yet the privileging of race as an analytic category has produced a lopsided historiography, in which Christianity has been marginalized in studies of gender and empire, and in which gender has not been used to full effect in explicating the uneven contours of religion and colonialism. This essay explores how studies of women, gender, and the Protestant missionary movement over the ‘long nineteenth century’ have responded to and manifested some of the larger tensions of women's and gender history, feminist history, postcolonial studies, the new imperial history, and area studies, and suggests some avenues for addressing lingering questions of recovery and representation, center and periphery.

Tennyson and the Ladies

In his 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical and 1832 Poems, published more than a dozen lyrics now designated poems--taking his titles heroines of Shakespeare and Spenser, modern and classical authors, and letting them evolve, as he put it, camel, my own consciousness. (1) For much of his career and century after, critics tended to dismiss these poems, his friend Edward FitzGerald who thought them a tiresome Gallery to late A. Dwight Culler who quipped that poems began, very suddenly, with onset of puberty and stopped, very suddenly, with access of judgment. (2) We can understand Culler's impatience with airy, fairy Lilian, ever varying Madeline, or faintly smiling Adeline as exhibitions of an adolescent's erotic fantasies. Yet recent scholars have countered Culler's critique, pointing out that continued to place Claribel at head of his collections, including Poems, in Two Volumes (1842) and Moxon (1857), and arguing that lady poems embed his enduring concerns: freedoms and constrictions of human condition (James Hood), feminization of lyric and literary culture (Richard Cronin, Carol Christ, Catherine Maxwell, Herbert Tucker), and an anxiety over status of in modern England (Linda Hughes, Gerhard Joseph, Joseph Chadwick, et al.). (3) Even Culler acknowledged this last concern as it pertained to Tennyson's development: Tennyson stopped painting them and allowed them to speak.... In so doing he transformed them an art object into a symbol of artist (p. 40). While acknowledging developmental function of lady poems in Tennyson's oeuvre, I want to explore instead their participation in a contemporary debate over of phrase I take Anna Jameson's Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical, and Historical (1832). Published in same year as Poems, this text was not directly influential on Tennyson's work; rather, Jameson's study, like Tennyson's poems, represents an engagement with public debates about woman's character and her newly emerging cultural role by means of analyzing female of Shakespeare. Jameson's alternate title, Shakespeare's Heroines, (4) makes this link dear, as do articles about Shakespeare's heroines in periodicals of 1820s and reviews of Fanny Kemble's acting in period 1829-1832. Tennyson's lady poems reflect poet's interest in of women, including his recognition of what a masculine perspective might offer to questions about women's nature, roles, influence, and mission. The poems are not just adolescent fantasies, then, soon to disappear with the access of judgment, nor are they primarily vehicles for expressing artistic anxiety in a post-Romantic climate (though they may be both). Rather, as I read them, they are explorations of a pressing Victorian concern with social roles and contributions of women--a concern that emerged prominently in era of first Reform Bill and that would engage throughout his career. As I shall suggest, began his analysis of women's by meditating on Shakespeare's heroines, but by 1832, likely under Arthur Hallam's influence, he expanded his range to include female characters classical lyric and epic texts-an expansion that also deepened his thinking about women's roles in public sphere. Shakespeare's Heroines, Tennyson's Ladies, and Victorian Women What are characteristics of women? Jameson raises this question in response to a conventional eighteenth-century view, expressed succinctly by Alexander Pope, that most women have no characters at all and to a specific strand of literary criticism that considered Shakespeare's heroines to be inferior to his heroes because less carefully delineated and virtually undifferentiated as characters. As Julie Hankey observes, Shakespeare critics from Restoration onward had generally assumed that, compared with his men, his women were on whole slight. …