Women Missionaries Research Articles

Gender, Work, and Zeal: Women Missionaries in Canada and Abroad

Ruth Compton Brouwer, Modern Women Modernizing Men: The Changing Missions of Three Professional Women in Asia and Africa, 1902-69 (Vancouver University of British Columbia Press 2002) Shirley Jane Endicott, China Diary: The Life of Mary Austin Endicott (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2003) Myra Rutherdale, Women and the White Man's God: Gender and Race in the Canadian Mission Field (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2002)

Instruments in the Hand of God: Missionary Women in Malaya, 1815–45

Most previous research on female missionaries in the Asia-Pacific region has dealt with the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and/or has concentrated on American women In contrast, this article explores the motives and experiences of British women who were actively involved in mission stations in the Straits Settlements in Malaya, working under the auspices of the London Missionary Society; and it examines the early period of missionary activity in the region, from 1815 to 1845. The paper focuses on a key, but previously neglected issue: the women's motives for becoming involved in missionary endeavor. These women created a notional space for themselves as mission workers, firstly by means of ideas about being useful instruments in God's work; and secondly by asserting a direct relationship with their God, unmediated by male missionaries or the officials of the missionary society. This conceptual strategy gave them scope for maneuver within gendered power structures and thus some degree of social and political leverage.

Married Women in Missions: The Effects of Cross-Cultural and Self Gender-Role Expectations on Well-Being, Stress, and Self-Esteem

The present study explored the effects of self-expectations and societal expectations of the host culture on the well-being of 37 married missionary women. The results did not support a relationship between the expectations of the host culture, and well-being. Homemakers appeared to be more relaxed and to experience life as more satisfying and interesting than women involved more actively in the missions task. The congruence of roles with self-expectations, role satisfaction, and freedom in choosing a role emerged as highly related to several indices of well-being. These findings highlight the centrality of freedom in choosing a role, and suggest that important subcultural differences in self-expectations exist in the Christian subculture which should be taken into account in research on women's issues.

Gender, religion, and ‘heathen lands’: american missionary women in south asia (1860s-1940s)

Gender, religion, and ‘heathen lands’: american missionary women in south asia (1860s-1940s)

White Womanhood and Religion: Colonial Discourse in the U.S. Women's Missionary Press, 1869-1904

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how an identity of white womanhood was constructed in nineteenth-century women's foreign missionary publications, particularly in relationship to women of other countries. Using a framework of postcolonial feminism, the paper seeks to uncover the discourses of colonialism and to place women at the forefront of this questioning by analyzing how Western white women's writings and communication practices were implicated in the colonial project. The content of three nineteenth-century women's missionary publications is studied with respect to constructions of white womanhood and how this discourse intersects with religion and U.S. colonialism. While content does exhibit colonial structures of discourse and the supremacy of whiteness, it also points to ambivalence and to relationships of affinity among U.S. women and women in other countries. Ultimately, such discourse, while representing the durability of colonial discourse, may also suggest the presence of transnational relationships built against common concerns, such as the valued role of women and the constraints of patriarchy.

White Womanhood and Religion: Colonial Discourse in the U.S. Women's Missionary Press, 1869-1904

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how an identity of white womanhood was constructed in nineteenth-century women's foreign missionary publications, particularly in relationship to women of other countries. Using a framework of postcolonial feminism, the paper seeks to uncover the discourses of colonialism and to place women at the forefront of this questioning by analyzing how Western white women's writings and communication practices were implicated in the colonial project. The content of three nineteenth-century women's missionary publications is studied with respect to constructions of white womanhood and how this discourse intersects with religion and U.S. colonialism. While content does exhibit colonial structures of discourse and the supremacy of whiteness, it also points to ambivalence and to relationships of affinity among U.S. women and women in other countries. Ultimately, such discourse, while representing the durability of colonial discourse, may also suggest the presence of transnational relationships built against common concerns, such as the valued role of women and the constraints of patriarchy.

Cartographies of friendship: mapping missionary women's educational networks in Aotearoa/New Zealand 1823-40

Introduction This article offers a textual map of ways in which two Church Missionary Society (CMS) women, Marianne Coldham Williams and Jane Nelson Williams, established networks predominantly with their evangelical ‘sisters’ in England that simultaneously supported, justified and reinforced their work as missionary educators in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the period 1823-1840.1 Particular attention is paid to mapping textual representations of evangelical women’s educative activities and the problematic relationship of authorship and authority in the exchange of correspondence between the cultural and evangelical metropole (England) and the reconfigured and evangelised periphery (Aotearoa/New Zealand). Primarily this article presents a textual interpretation of Marianne and Jane’s missionary activities that simultaneously supported the imperial ameliorative project and subjected Maori women to their colonising gaze within a colonised space.2 As Christian wives and mothers, Marianne and Jane formed close relationships with women from similar evangelical and class backgrounds to form bonds of ‘sisterhood’ that assisted in the formation of educational networks that regulated and legitimated women’s participation in missionary activities. In the exchange of correspondence with their ‘sisters’ in England, the two evangelical women cast themselves in an authoritative role in the schooling of Maori women in the Bay of Islands area in northern Aotearoa/New Zealand. The educative work of Marianne and Jane was based on assumptions regarding the moral imperative to regenerate Indigenous women through the active intervention and

Negotiating for Space and Autonomy: Strategies of Finnish Missionary Women in Japan, 1900-1941

ABSTRACT. This article focuses on the strategies Finnish women used to influence their status and the missionary practices in the Japan mission of the Lutheran Evangelical Association of Finland during the early part of the 20th century. Women had a head-start in the mission compared to men but lost this later as the organization developed. However, the early years demonstrate how women were able to gain a foothold simply by exceptional circumstances, such as a political turmoil. The crisis years of the Finnish mission in the early 1910s illustrate how organizational rigidity was created at the cost of women's status, but also that everyday work carried out separately from the men's work offered women satisfactory roles regardless of the patriarchal structure. An additional strategy is introduced by the career of one missionary, Siiri Uusitalo. A lifelong career in the mission and a pioneer's status enabled Siiri Uusitalo to carve out an independent position inside the Finnish mission which can be defined as matriarchal. Through the Finnish female missionaries, the contested male control of the mission in the Japanese context is discussed. The article presents one historically unique case that nevertheless points to certain patterns in contesting and redefining the gendered hierarchy in a religious community amidst a foreign culture.

Mobilization and Change in a Trade Union Setting: Environment, Structures and Action

This case study, based on data collected from archival and interview sources, describes the variable efficacy over a 24-year period of a union-based women's committee. A theoretical model was developed that identified environmental factors, union and committee structures, and committee characteristics as variables that might affect the committee's effectiveness. Outcomes of three types were considered: structural changes that would benefit women, increased female participation in union decision making, and improved clauses in the collective agreement especially relevant to women. The study shows that while environmental factors and formal structures play an important role in achieving mobilization and change, the actions of the Social Movement Organization (SMO) itself, and of all the parties potentially affected by the SMO, are equally critical. The social movement literature complements the industrial relations and feminist organizational literatures in explaining the processes involved in successful collective action.

Small country – big results: Women's football in Norway

The study opens with a description of the development of women's football in Norway. It can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was only in 1975 when the Norwegian Football Association formally recognized it. Prior to 1975, the pioneers of women's football struggled hard to get women's football accepted. Today, women's football is the most popular sport for girls and women in Norway, in spite of the fact that it is still regarded as a masculine sport. The reasons for the enormous increase in female football players are discussed. One major factor seems to be the work of a women's committee appointed by the Football Association when women's football was first accepted in the middle of the 1970s. For the Committee, the education and promotion of female leaders, coaches and referees, as well as the need to increase the number of players, were important. The essay concludes with results from a study about the experiences and the meaning of football in the lives of Norwegian female football players of today.

Constructing Women's Status: Policy Discourses of University Women's Commission Reports

In this article, Elizabeth J. Allan explores how discourses embedded in university women's commission reports position women as victims, outsiders to the structure and culture of the institution, and as being in need of professional development. Using policy discourse analysis, Allan examines discourses generated by university women's commissions, which are policy-focused groups advocating for gender equity in higher education. Allan analyzes the text of twenty-one commission reports issued at four research universities from 1971 to 1996, and illustrates how dominant discourses of femininity, access, and professionalism contribute to constructing women's status in complex ways and may have the unintended consequence of undermining the achievement of gender equity. She also explores how a caregiving discourse is drawn on and challenges institutional norms of the academic workplace. Allan provides four suggestions for improving university women's commissions, including promoting awareness of policy as discourse; analyzing frameworks and assumptions of policy reports; examining implications of policy recommendations; and looking at how policy discourses construct images of women.

Crafting a legacy: contemporary American crafts in the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Crafting a Legacy showcases the Philadelphia Museum of Art's burgeoning collection of contemporary American crafts. More than a hundred color plates illustrate many of the Museum's prime holdings in ceramics, wood, fiber, glass, metal, and furniture. Entries on each of the sixty-three featured artists, including Rudolf Staffel, Sheila Hicks, Dale Chihuly, and Judy McKie, place the artist's work in a broader context. Suzanne Ramljak, editor of Metalsmith magazine, provides an essay on the valuable role that crafts play in contemporary culture, arguing that in a world of mass-produced goods, one-of-a-kind handmade objects act as agents of resistance to reawaken our senses. An introduction by Darrel Sewell, the Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Curator of American Art, discusses the history of the crafts collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as the vital role Philadelphia has played as a center for innovation in contemporary crafts. This catalog is published to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show, sponsored by the Women's Committee.

Book Reviews : Maina Chawla Singh, Gender, Religion, and 'Heathen Lands': American Missionary Women in South Asia (1860s-1940s). New York and London: Garland Publishing. 2000. 393 pages. Rs.1,775

Book Reviews : Maina Chawla Singh, Gender, Religion, and 'Heathen Lands': American Missionary Women in South Asia (1860s-1940s). New York and London: Garland Publishing. 2000. 393 pages. Rs.1,775

Book reviews and notices : MAINA CHAWLA SINGH, Gender, religion and 'Heathen Lands': American missionary women in South Asia (1860s-1940s). New York/London: Garland Publishing, 2000. xiv + 393 pp. Maps, notes, appendices, bibliography, index

Book reviews and notices : MAINA CHAWLA SINGH, Gender, religion and 'Heathen Lands': American missionary women in South Asia (1860s-1940s). New York/London: Garland Publishing, 2000. xiv + 393 pp. Maps, notes, appendices, bibliography, index

A place at the table: Women's committee requests and women's committee assignments in the U.S. house

A place at the table: Women's committee requests and women's committee assignments in the U.S. house

Travelling for God and Adventure: Women Missionaries in the Late 19th Century

Throughout the 19th century, women from the United States travelled as wives or alone to remote regions of the world under the auspices of mis sionary work. One of the largest of the missionary organizations was the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), origi nating in Boston Massachusetts in 1810. The ABCFM, along with other missionary organizations, not only gave women the respectability and insti tutional support they needed to travel and remain within the bounds of Victorian womanhood, but also elevated and in some cases made heroines of them. Historians have generally conceptualized missionaries within the framework of their Christian identity and evangelical goals, and often as cultural imperialists. This essay shifts the focus to the individual women missionaries as lone travellers, bringing their western cultural ideas and imaginings to politically tumultuous Turkey in the 19th century. The women in the study were educated at women's colleges in the US and were, in turn, the founders of educational institutions for women and girls. In Turkey missionaries were prohibited from proselytizing among Muslims, and concentrated their efforts among Greeks, Armenians and other minorities who were colonized within the borders of the Ottoman Empire. As founders of schools, missionaries were engaged not only in the central missionary enterprise of religious conversion, but also in negotiat ing concepts of womanhood, in understanding the political context of edu cation and national identity formation, and in navigating tensions among powerful and competing religious ideologies. Applying the metaphor of travel opens up a new way of analysing missionary women's experiences, looking not only at where they went and what they did, but the ideas, objects and beliefs they carried with them. Although the nineteenth-century ideology of travel was to broaden and mature the traveller, missionaries on the other hand were also expected to remain steadfast in their religious convictions and purpose. This essay focuses on the interaction between the missionaries and the people they came to save, a process leading inevitably to mutual accommodation. Culturally hybridized mission schools came to reflect the power of local

Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism

Since the early twentieth century, women's aspirations have taken a variety of forms in Protestant churches, shaped by such forces as feminism, secularization, social activism, and the professionalization of religious work. Giving voice to a broad range of Protestant women, this landmark volume launches a stimulating investigation into the story of women and religion in the twentieth century. These smart, vigorous essays run the gamut of historical contexts to probe the meaning and impact of social change on women in the Contributors consider the emergence of Latina Pentecostal clergy in the United States and the success of the Women's Missionary Union of the Southern Baptist Convention in remaining independent of male-dominated denominational structures. They discuss James Dobson's Focus on the Family, a program closely associated with conservative, fundamentalist values, and ponder its enormous appeal to women and girls. Among other topics, the authors discuss Chinese immigrant women who embraced the relative freedom offered by Protestant religion, turn-of-the-century African American women who assumed religious authority through their historical writing, and the struggles of women faith healers in defining their role amid medical and evangelical professionalism. They also pursue links between a feminine preference for nonconfrontational, egalitarian settings and the nature of women's successes and setbacks in their churches. Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism demonstrates the variety of women's experience and the breadth of their influence as missionaries, thinkers, activists, theologians, and reformers. This important volume also illustrates the persistence of the stained-glass ceiling in constraining women's ordination as well as the increasing disenchantment of many within the church.

Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Dana L. Robert. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002. xiii + 249 pages. $25.00 (paper).

Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Dana L. Robert. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002. xiii + 249 pages. $25.00 (paper).

Negotiating for Space and Autonomy: Strategies of Finnish Missionary Women in Japan, 1900-1941

Negotiating for Space and Autonomy: Strategies of Finnish Missionary Women in Japan, 1900-1941

'She Herself was the Ultimate Rule': Arabic biographies of missionary teachers and their pupils

Arabic biographies of missionary teachers and their pupils found in magazines published in Cairo and Beirut voice an indigenous perspective on missionary activity by educated women and men. The feelings of the missionaries' target population reveal a tension between local histories and foreign incursions as well as between female domesticity and professional aspirations. This larger imperial discourse informed worldwide missionary agendas for women at the turn of the twentieth century; however, the individual biographies cited within the paper demonstrate the personal interaction and effects on both foreign missionary and local women within their specific context through insightful Arab sources.