1
Yale-Edinburgh Group 2014
LIST OF PAPERS, IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER OF PRESENTER’S SURNAME
SESSION 2C
Gender and marriage: the case of the ordained women in the Presbyterian Church of Ghana
Grace Sintim Adasi, Accra Polytechnic, Accra
This paper discusses the ordained women in the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, (PCG) and examines how gender
prescribes roles in the family and in the PCG. Gender refers to the social attributes associated with male and female
and their relationships that are socially constructed. Christianity prescribes to women the role they must play in their
matrimonial homes. Women played major roles in the history of the Basel Mission in the then Gold Coast. However,
they are portrayed as wives of missionaries. More precisely, they were seen as mission brides and wives, thus
representing virtually the collective property of the Mission. In combining the traditional and contemporary roles,
many women find themselves playing the roles as wives, mothers, reverend ministers. The PCG puts strong
emphasis on family life and the issue of relocation has greatly influenced some of the PCG’s member’s attitude to
couple ministry. In traditional cultural practice women did not take leadership positions when men were
around. The study examines the theory of feminism as a theoretical frame using historical analysis method. Based
on fieldwork in Ghana, it argues that male chauvinism creates perpetuates gender inequality. The paper postulates
that culture assigns women in the family to the domestic domain but women and men should act in partnership.
SESSION 4B
Defining Christian womanhood: the African Education Group and the Phelps Stokes Commission reports through
the 1920’s
Andrew Barnes, Arizona State University
The African Education Group (AEG) was set up by the International Missionary Council (IMC) to serve as a
shadow committee where missionaries could air out among themselves issues that emerged before the Advisory
Committee on Education in Tropical Africa at the British Colonial Office. Thanks to the recommendations
published in the two Phelps Stokes Commission reports, one of the major topics to which the (AEG) returned again
and again was women’s education in Africa. This is because the Phelps Stokes Commission reports identified the
creation of African Christian families held together by strong Christian wives and mothers as key to the “civilizing”
of the African continent. The ambition of this paper will be two fold. First will be to identify the major ways in
which the AEG thought to realize the Commission’s recommendations via educational initiatives. Second will be to
look at the debate within the AEG about the success of the initiatives across the 1920s. By the end of that decade,
there was significant missionary pushback against the Commission and its recommendations. But it is not clear that
recommendations concerning Christian womanhood were ever abandoned.
SESSION 8C
Bachelor or family father? functions and conceptions of men, women, and their collaboration in 19 th century
missions
Judith Becker, Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz
In a first part, this paper will analyse the discourse about celibacy and marriage among Basel missionaries in the first
decades of their Indian mission. While some missionaries argued that marriage would distracts them from their work,
others asked the mission committee to send them wives, giving lists of demanded skills and accomplishments. Even
more interesting are those missionaries who explained why they thought they (or their colleagues) ought to marry
although they would prefer celibacy. In these cases, wives were seen as useful or even indispensable for the success
of the mission. They should guarantee order and decorum in male-dominated environments. Contrary to other
mission societies of the time, the Basel missionaries only seldom referred to an envisaged better contact to Indian
females as an argument in this context. The second part of the paper will explore the work of missionaries' wives
and the conceptions they themselves had of their collaboration. While in some cases missionaries' wives themselves
wrote reports and were often quoted in the mission periodicals (e.g. Julie Gundert), in other cases the husbands
wrote the reports in the name of both (e.g. Johannes Müller and his wife). Then, there were those whose wives did
not appear at all in the reports and others who collaborated so intensely that several letters, reports, and scientific
work are written in both partners' handwriting. The paper will conclude with some general remarks about
conceptions of family and the significance of factual collaboration on the mission field.
1
2
SESSION 6C
Woman as helpmeet: married women’s support for Scottish Presbyterian missions in the 19th century
Esther Breitenbach, University of Edinburgh
This paper argues that women married to missionaries frequently played an important role in missionary work both
in the mission field and in encouraging support at home. Yet they often had a very low public profile, not just
compared to male missionaries but also to single women missionaries. Many Scottish Presbyterian missionaries
were married and indeed encouraged to be so, but married women were often not included in statistics about the
missionary workforce, nor was their work much written about in missionary periodicals. This paper will illustrate
the role of married women in the mission field and in encouraging support at home through discussion of selected
examples, such as Margaret Wilson and Maria Mitchell, whose husbands worked in missions in India. It will draw
on research examining missionary biographies, periodicals and mission histories relating to missions of the Church
of Scotland, Free Church of Scotland, and the United Presbyterian Church in the period c. 1830 to c. 1900.
SESSION 6A
“The testimony must begin in the home”: re-making families in the East African Revival
Jason Bruner, Arizona State University
The East African Revival, which emerged in the 1930s in Rwanda and Uganda, is known for the ways it challenged
individuals to make radical breaks with their “sinful” pasts and give testimony to the light of salvation in which they
now lived. What has been less acknowledged are the many ways that the revival provoked converts to envision and
enact new domestic modes, which were sustained by regular fellowship meetings with other revivalists. The home
was the site of many of the most profound and controversial changes that the revival occasioned. The revival altered
diets by challenging converts to consume previously “taboo” food items. Balokole developed new decision-making
practices that were collaborative and open between husbands and wives. In some cases, Balokole redesigned their
homes, whose spaces more appropriately reflected their “saved” lifestyle and moral convictions. Balokole parents
named their children differently—and disciplined them differently—than their “unsaved” neighbors. Revivalists
tended to accept new notions of bodily, domestic, and culinary cleanliness, initiating practices like the pasteurization
of dairy. Importantly, Balokole viewed these new domestic patterns as being discontinuous with their past ways of
life. These radical lifestyle changes demonstrated how Balokole had turned from darkness to light and were,
therefore, an essential part of their “testimony.” They also demonstrate how the revival movement was not simply a
new message of eternal salvation, but also became a new lifestyle that radically transformed quotidian patterns of
family life.
SESSION 5C
Women in the life of Eugène Casalis (1812-1891), missionary and director of the Société des Missions Évangéliques
de Paris
David Bundy, New York Theological Seminary
The women in the life of Eugène Casalis are known and knowable today primarily because of their relationships
with him, either as family members, wives of colleagues, or subjects of anthropological study and publications.
Using primary sources, including correspondence, photos and publications, and building on the work of other
scholars (Aubret, 2011; Zorn, 1993, 2011), this work examines the identities and roles of women reflected in the
writings by and about Casalis and his family. It looks at the portrayals of and relationships with African women, his
mother, older female relatives, his daughter and his wives as well as women missionary wives and acquaintances.
As an early and sympathetic observer of Basotho culture, as the senior missionary among the French missionaries
working in Lesotho, and as a mission administrator, he made countless decisions that both effected, enabled,
disabled, and interpreted the lives of the women around him.
2
3
SESSION 5C
Gendered remembrance: women in missionary commemoration
Iris Busschers, University of Groningen
By employing insights from collective memory studies, this paper reassesses the manner in which missionary
women have been written in and out of Dutch mission history with the aim to shed new light on the idea that in
Dutch missions, more than in those of other nations, women held a marginal position up to the late 1930s. I do so by
analysing commemorative texts (e.g. obituaries) published in missionary journals of two Dutch mission
organisations between 1900 and 1949 as a main source through which a more systemic overview of the formation of
narratives about ‘dominant’ and ‘marginalised’ groups in mission can be obtained. The main question being who
was commemorated, at what time, in what manner, and why? In focusing on missionary women in this manner,
gender is not the sole focus of this paper. Rather, attention is paid to the intersection of gender with class, profession,
and, perhaps most significantly, membership or alignment with one of the multi-generational missionary families at
the site: how did this influence the manner in which individual women were commemorated and thus included in
public discourse about mission? I combine the insights gained from these commemorative sources with case studies
of archival material on missionary women who were active on East Java and Papua. Working from the triangular
relation between public memorialisation, history, and individual experience as recorded in archival sources, I
analyse the differences in public discourse accessible to the missionary public at home and the discourse in letters
between missionary women, colleagues and the missionary board. In other words, at what institutional level were
master narratives about Dutch missionary women formulated and to what extent could individual women change the
narrative around through their own agency? And finally, what does this tell us about the extent to which missionary
women have been acknowledged in Dutch mission history?
SESSION 8A
Confucian family, Christian family: towards an integrative theology of the family and the church
Alexander Chow, University of Edinburgh
The Confucian understanding of the family is often cited as a distinctive characteristic of East Asian traditional
cultures. This is built on the notion of filial piety, which speaks about the biological family, both living and dead, as
well as the relationships one has with the state and the society. Stretching as early as the seventh century, Christian
missions to East Asia have needed to contend with this teaching, coming across conflicting views around celibacy,
ancestral veneration, and filial devotion to the state. Contrastingly, filial piety has likewise been instrumental for the
mass conversion of Catholic villages and the communication of ideas like infant baptism. However, rapid
industrialisation in East Asia has posed a significant threat to the Confucian family. Urbanisation, individualism,
ruthless competition, and China’s one-child policy have all led to a weakened understanding of the family and a
pervasive disregard of the elderly. This is not to say that filial piety is now extinct. Rather, it has been reconstituted
in different social forms – most notably, for the purposes of this paper, in the Christian church. This has brought
upon a strong practice of Christian bond within the surrogate family of the local church. Moreover, ministers and
other church leaders are regarded as surrogate parents and older siblings. In many cases, the translation of the
Confucian family into the Christian family has resulted in hierarchical and patriarchal views that lead to problems in
power dynamics and corruption within charismatic leadership. After discussing these shifts in greater detail, this
paper will engage various Confucian and Christian texts and propose a theological foundation for the family, and
discuss its direct repercussions on the theology of the church and the local church’s responsibility in the greater
society.
SESSION 9A
Adventist Schism and Women in China’s Wenzhou
Christie Chui-Shan Chow, Princeton Theological Seminary
This paper draws on ethnographic investigation of the Seventh-day Adventist movement in China’s Wenzhou to
argue that schism empowered lay Christian women by allowing them to exercise active agency against patriarchy
inside the church. A homegrown Protestant religion in the 19 th century USA, the Seventh-day Adventists entered
China in the early 20th century. While American Adventist missionaries attracted women converts through social
mobility in medical, educational, and publishing sectors, Adventist conservative approach toward ministry barred
Chinese women from obtaining formal clerical status and limited their leadership role in church service. These
3
4
androcentric practices remain intact today. In the1970s, schism broke out among Adventists in downtown Wenzhou
due to personal, doctrinal, and liturgical disagreements. Adventists were divided into the reformist and conservative
factions. The reformists promoted a new praying practice and reoriented Adventist’s longstanding law-based
spirituality toward grace-based salvation. The conservatives resisted the reformists’ claims and insisted on
maintaining the status quo. As these rival Adventist male leaders outsourced their disputes from downtown to
suburban Wenzhou, women laity turned schism into an avenue that would broaden their participation in ritual
practice, ecclesiastic leadership, and negotiation with the local government. As a result, schism permitted a larger
role for female church members to challenge male headship in church service, thereby facilitating their participation
in the public religious domain.
SESSION 6A
The Church of Scotland Mission to Kenya and the making of ‘women and girls’ c.1906-1938
Tom Cunningham, University of Edinburgh
An important strand of the Church of Scotland Mission to Kenya was a ‘mission to women and girls’, the focus of
this paper. This ‘particular mission’, it is argued, involved ‘making women and girls’, something which agents of the
CSM sought to undertake on the bodies and in the minds of potential converts. Its most overt expression was the
infamous campaign against ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ in the late 1920s. This, however, was just one of a variety
of ‘techniques’ through which the CSM sought to (re)make female bodies and minds. Following prevalent trends in
what has been called the ‘new’ colonial history, this paper tells the story of how the Church of Scotland Mission to
Kenya sought to make women and girls through mundane, domestic, and everyday means such as through dietary
habits, hygienic routines, clothing, sleeping arrangements, and forms of recreation. Buttressing this argument are
two further elements which each constitute critical contributions to the existing literature. First, the paper draws
attention to the less documented way in which the European white female body was itself integral to this
domesticating agenda and was, moreover, itself ‘made.’ The paper explores the ways female agents of the Church of
Scotland created and ‘performed’ their ideal of womanhood, both as an example to their African charges and as a
way of affirming to themselves and their peers, their own identities. Second, and fitting for a topic with an emphasis
on material culture, the paper foregrounds visual material. This represents a significant break from the dominant
practice in the existing literature to rely exclusively on textual and documentary evidence. Most significantly,
evidence includes a rare motion film made by the staff at Chogoria station in 1933 in which 'women and girls’ are a
primary focus.
SESSION 9C
Angels of Progress in Brazil: the American Protestant missionary women (1870-1920)
Eliane Moura da Silva, State University of Campinas
This is a paper on the relationship between gender and religion and is based on a study of the cultural history of
American Protestant missionary women in Brazil between 1870 and 1920. The agreements and disagreements
during the Protestant religious missions altered gender trajectories in a long and contentious process. The gender
dynamics often assumed irregular forms: in contact with native women, the missionaries had to negotiate not only
the relationships with their own beliefs, their feelings, and the male structures of power, but also with the sets of
rules and restrictions that structured the relationships in the new environments in which they were settled.
SESSION 9C
The educational integration in homes as a Protestant missionary strategy in Brazil (1930-1945)
Paulo Julião da Silva, Universidade de Campinas - Brazil
The aim of this study is to analyze the strategies of consolidation and missionary expansion of Protestants in Brazil
through educational integration in homes. The ecclesiastical leaders believed that such a method would be of
fundamental importance for the maintenance of the "true Christian principles "in Brazilian evangelical families.
Catholics were seen as defilers of society and the "believers" should present themselves as different in the face of
such. Families were instructed to keep themselves away from the "world" and walk in accordance with the "laws of
the Lord." Such teachings were spread through newspapers that were distributed in the churches, which were the
main mean of communication in that period. Discourses and Protestant representations that are regarded as ideal for
"exemplary family" are to be analyzed as well as the use of periodicals (Baptists and Methodists) and part of the
historiography that deals with the theme. Thus we intend to contribute to the discussions on Protestant missionary
4
5
strategies, particularly as the participation of the family in the process of consolidation of evangelistic faith is
regarded.
SESSION 2C
Birifor women in Christian mission: a case study of two women influencing the growth of the Apostolic Church of
Ghana and the Evangelical Protestant Church of Burkina Faso (l’Eglise Protestante Evangélique Du Burkina Faso)
Ini Dorcas Dah, Akrofi-Christaller Institute, Ghana
The Birifor of West Africa are divided by the colonial boundaries of three countries: Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire
and Ghana. Christian missionaries first entered this region in the early twentieth century, but there has been little
documentation on the significant role that Birifor women have played in the expansion of Christianity in the area.
This paper will explore and assess the influence on the spread of Christian mission and the growth of the church by
two women: Suzanna Chiportey Yirilo of the Apostolic Church of Ghana and Imhobnuor Kambou of the Protestant
Evangelical Church of Burkina Faso.
SESSION 2A
Family trees: roots and branches: the dynasty and legacy of the Reverend Tiyo Soga
Joanne Davis, Graduate of UNISA, Pretoria
The Reverend Tiyo Soga, ordained as a minister in the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland in December 1856,
is noted for many outstanding firsts: first ordained South African minister, and second only to Bishop Samuel
Crowther on the whole continent; first African man to take a tertiary degree in the United Kingdom; first African
man to marry a white woman, Glaswegian Janet Burnside, first African minister to run a mission station, at Mgwali
in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, and first African to lead the missionary office of a foreign church in Africa.
However, one area not yet commented on in Soga scholarship is the legacy of his family within the ministry. I
propose in this paper to discuss the role of Soga’s parents, ‘Old Soga’, and NoSutu Soga, in his conversion, and
introduce his wife, Janet Soga, and their seven surviving children, of whom two sons, William Andrew and John
Henderson, were ordained ministers and missionaries, and two daughters, Isabelle McFarlane and Frances Marie
Anna, worked in missions in the Eastern Cape. In addition, Soga’s sister Tause Soga worked at the Uniondale
Mission Station with the UPC Reverend Niven, and Soga’s nephew and namesake, Tiyo Burnside Soga, became an
ordained minister and writer, and since then, several of Soga’s great- and great-great grandchildren have gone into
the ministry. The three remaining Soga siblings who did not go in for the ministry nonetheless led full and
interesting lives; Alan Kirkland was a pioneer of the now ruling African National Congress, Jotello Festiri was the
first South African veterinary surgeon, and Jessie Margaret was a pianist and music teacher in Scotland, where she
looked after Janet Soga after they moved to Dollar following Soga’s death. This paper seeks to situate the Soga
family as a powerful family in South African religious history and its intelligentsia. Their history is only just
becoming known and knowable as contemporary scholarship redeems the details of their lives from the irascible
history of apartheid.
SESSION 5C
Female missionaries and missionary-imperial feminism: the case of Katharine Bushnell
Kristin Du Mez, Calvin College
This paper examines historiographical discussions of gender, missions, and Western imperialism in light of the life
and work of Katharine Bushnell (1855-1946), an American Methodist missionary to China, international social
purity activist, and feminist theologian. It demonstrates how Bushnell’s confidence in Western Christian superiority
was quickly shaken through her experiences on the mission field, and even more so as a result of her social purity
activism, first in the United States, and then in British India, China, Singapore, and Hong Kong. It traces how her
experiences in missions and global social reform inspired her to pen a remarkable feminist theology, one that
continues to be read today by Christians in the West and around the world, and situates her story in the context of
the complex and nuanced scholarship on female missionaries and “gender-imperial feminism.”
5
6
SESSION 4C
Doing mission differently in Africa: the faces and phases of Slessor of Calabar in the 19th century and Maathai of
Kenya in the 21st century
Angela Dwamena-Aboagye, Akrofi-Christaller Institute, Ghana
What is mission? Can mission within the framework of World Christianity be defined differently depending on who
is doing it, what they are doing, and the significance and impact of what is done? This paper examines two notable
women who were involved in Missio Dei – of different racial backgrounds and different centuries of engagement in
mission in Africa. These two women challenged the gender expectations and barriers of their time. While one could
be defined traditionally as a missionary, the other may attract controversy for being described as involved in mission
or missionary work. The dynamics of their work and their impact would be the subject of this paper, whose aim is to
help readers determine for themselves what constitutes mission within the context of missions and World
Christianity. Mary Slessor was a Scot who spent almost 40 years in the Calabar missionary field in Nigeria in the
19th Century, and died in one of its villages. Slessor’s remarkable life and service is worth telling. Inspite of the
baggage of Western Europeanising tendencies, Slessor came into Africa with a mind for mission and to transform
the lives of many – which she did. Wangari Maathai of Kenya was an African Christian woman. She worked
tirelessly to heighten awareness and engage in critical actions on environmental sustainability. Her analysis and
insight into the important linkages between social justice, good governance, equality, women’s empowerment,
dignity, human rights, and spirituality to environmental care and climate change issues was remarkable. What is the
significance of Maathai’s contributions? How does she engage in “mission”? And how does her message on
environmental justice make her a world missionary?
SESSION 4C
The memorialisation of Mary Slessor in the Reformed PCN
Ngozi U. Emeka-Nwobia, Ebonyi State University, Abakaliki- Nigeria
In 2010 the Presbyterian church of Nigeria (PCN), formerly known as the Church of Scotland Mission, had a serious
animosity among its members over an outcry by the Mid - East Synod of manipulation, impending injustice, and
deprivation of its right to produce a new General Assembly Moderator. This led to power tussle, which resulted in
certain section of the church (the aggrieved members) seceding from the parent stock to form the Reformed
Presbyterian Church. Most religious instruments, logo and uniform associated with the old PCN were changed with
the exception of the legacy of Mary Slessor drawn in the uniform material (wrapper) worn by the Women Guild.
This motivated our interest to probe into the reason for that. This work sets out to explore the following; what is the
new perception of Mary Slessor by the 21 st century Eastern Nigerian Women particularly female members of the
Reformed Presbyterian church of Nigeria (RPCN)? What memories do they have of her? How is /was her status as
an unmarried missionary perceived in a culture where unmarried adult women are viewed as social outcast? What is
the role and status of women in the PCN and Reformed Presbyterian church? What are the activities of the RPCN
and their perception about the family?
SESSION 7A
Contested virtue: Māori ship-girls and missionary marriage in New Zealand, 1823-1830
Malcolm Falloon, Otago University
The 1820s saw an ever increasing number of European ships calling into the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, for
supplies. This in turn led to a dramatic increase in the number of Māori ship-girls who frequented those vessels. The
driver of this sex-trade was the war economy of the Ngā Puhi tribe and its thirst for muskets and powder. Māori for
their part, were happy for their daughters to be exploited in this way, especially for the trade they obtained, and saw
no inherent conflict with their traditional sexual customs. Confronted with this situation, however, the CMS
missionaries sought to draw Māori girls away from the shipping by the formation of girls’ schools on the mission
stations. This entailed the strategic engagement of missionary wives and daughters in the work of the mission, both
as teachers and as exemplars of Christian family life. This paper explores the volatile encounter between Māori and
the differing models of European morality offered by sailor and 'ʹsaint'ʹ, which eventually overflowed into the armed
conflict known as the 'ʹgirls war'ʹ in early 1830. Having outlined this context, the paper traces the formation of the
Christian Māori family as it emerged from a context of polygamy and traditional Māori marriage customs.
6
7
SESSION 9B
The Schreiners and mission: the story of a South African family
Deborah Gaitskell, SOAS, University of London
Gottlob Schreiner, born exactly 200 years ago, was ostensibly a ‘failed’ missionary with both the London
Missionary Society and the Wesleyan Methodists over nearly three decades. Yet all but one of his seven children
who survived into adulthood made their life in South Africa. The two youngest sought to defend the indigenous
population from imperial and settler depredations. Two others were active temperance advocates, a cause widely
taken up by African Christians too. Of this quartet, the two men also entered parliament as progressive-minded
representatives, William Philip Schreiner becoming prime minister of the Cape Colony and ending his days as South
African High Commissioner in London. His sister, Olive Schreiner, was an original thinker and feminist, producing
a stream of writing which continues to be closely studied. By contrast, the two oldest sisters, Catherine and Alice,
gave birth 11 and 15 times respectively, fulfilling Victorian gender expectations the most completely. This paper reevaluates Gottlob’s career alongside the contribution of his children and descendants to South African society, not
least in the wider spread and rooting of Christianity. Whereas American missionaries to Hawaii have been described
as setting out with the gospel to ‘do good’, while their children stayed on to ‘do well’, the legacy of some other
mission families may require a more nuanced verdict.
SESSION 5A
The paradox of the “dominant other”
Maggie Gitau, Africa International University, Nairobi
My paper looks into the how roles of single missionary women have evolved to reflect the needs of the changing
needs of world Christianity as reflected in the Kenyan urban context, the dominant cultural expectations of women,
and the personal life circumstances of the missionary herself. I do this by probing the life and ongoing mission work
of Rev Dr. Marta Bennett, a member of the PCUSA, Seattle Presbytery, where she trained and served as a young
woman before she responded to the missionary call to Africa. For more than twenty years, she has lived and served
in Kenya in a number of roles. She has served in Nairobi Chapel in leadership development, preaching and leading
small groups. She has taught at Daystar University as professor in biblical studies, Christian ministries, African
theology and leadership. She has held various positions of leadership at Daystar, including dean of students and
deputy academic vice chancellor. Marta has remained single all her life, with tow adopted Kenyan children and one
foster son. She has mentored many other African women. This paper will raise important questions on the
paradoxical roles of “the dominant other”. First of all, as a white woman, she is perceived to have access to better
resources and networks that are considered crucial in the churches and schools and parachurch organizations she has
been actively part of. Yet as a white woman, some limitations are imposed by the circumstances of organizations
that are keen to assert their indigeneity over against foreign influence. Other limitations are as a result of her being
seen as a woman in a world that is inclined towards patriarchy and male domination, while others are the result of
her single status in a world where marriage is the expected norm for Christian women.
SESSION 8B
Stepping out of their proper domain
Rosalind Gooden, Tabor, Adelaide
Charlotte Tucker, the successful author ALOE (A Lady of England) in 1875, in her fifties, went to India as a Zenana
missionary with the Church Missionary Society. Her poem, Mission Miss Sahibs, describing the life of Zenana
women missionaries, was so appreciated by the colonial Australasian Baptist missionaries that they reprinted it in
their magazine Our Bond. Her poem provides an interesting analysis of the lives of Zenana missionaries.
She concluded that particular poem with:
NB. Let all Mission Miss Sahibs single remain,
For if not, they step out of their proper domain,
And can never be Mission Miss Sahibs again.
Initially in the developing of the Zenana missionary movement there was an unjustified fear that single women
would desert their assignments and marry in numbers that would be a drain on limited mission resources .
‘Stepping out of their proper domain’, on the other hand, examines the experiences and contribution of Australian
Baptist Zenana women (between 1882 and 1950 within the British Raj) who did ‘step out of their proper domain’
and chose a call to marriage. Out of 88 Zenana women mission staff, 18 provide the case studies for this paper. The
7
8
majority of this group of 19 women who ‘married out of their proper domain’ form a well -trained, experienced and
committed component of missionary teams with their new partners--even though the Australasian Baptist Missions
largely ignored the significance of their ongoing service. They balanced their mission work with their contribution to
surprising small families. And, even more surprisingly, those who did not marry missionaries continued to fulfil
their initial missionary call, making unexpected and valuable contributions to the Gospel in India or elsewhere.
SESSION 9C
Gendered delusions: the borderlands mission of Melinda Rankin
Paul Harris, Minnesota State University
Melinda Rankin left New England to join the missionary campaign against Roman Catholicism in the American
West. After the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War, she convinced herself that she had an opportunity to sow
the seeds of Protestantism among the Mexicans living in the borderlands. In this work, she labored under a double
disadvantage. First, as a woman, she was restricted from the roles of minister and evangelist. Second, her mission
field was racked by civil and military strife, where Protestants could count upon neither official protection nor
public toleration. Yet her autobiographical account, Twenty Years among the Mexicans, transmutes these
disadvantages into a claim that, as a woman, she was able to quietly disseminate a subtle influence that penetrated
into areas where no male missionary could safely go. While cultivating a persona of womanly self-effacement and
godly self-denial, she took credit for the meager inroads of Protestantism in the region and brought upon herself the
scorn of the Anglos she left behind. This paper will look at an ambitious woman who spun a web of delusions out of
the gender ideology of nineteenth-century American evangelicalism.
SESSION 8C
Conflicting responsibilities: 20th-century missionaries between family demands and the obligation to the missionary
task
Andreas Heil, Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz
When missionaries decided to apply for missionary service, they did this as individuals. However, as many of them
got married and then had children, their decision did not leave other people’s lives unimpaired. It was not always
easy or not even possible to reconcile the responsibilities of a family father with the obligation to the missionary task.
In practice, the missionary task usually had priority over family demands, requesting from the family members to
make sacrifices in family life, for example to accept separation from the children, who were often sent to the
Western homelands. This paper deals with how this ranking of responsibilities was challenged in 20th century
mission work. It first introduces the conflict of those responsibilities in the 19th and 20th century. The paper uses
case examples of Basel missionaries in postcolonial India to illustrate how family matters were relevant in some
mission policy decisions of that time, which implicates a shift in the hierarchy of responsibilities. The final part
discusses these observations in the light of general developments in 20th-century societal history and mission history.
SESSION 8C
Being brother, father, mother and child at the same time – the metaphorical use of the concept of “family” in 18 th
century Tamil Nadu mission
Sabine Huebner, Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz
This paper will explore the character, use, and function of family-based metaphors in the mission context. Using the
Danish-English-Halle Mission in SE India as a case study, it will discuss how notions such as ‘child’, ‘parent’, and
‘sibling’ became relevant in the mission work. Drawing from a long Christian and a biblical tradition, the
missionaries used these metaphors to define their relationship both to God and to other Christians. The first part of
the paper will provide a closer insight as to how the Missionaries perceived themselves and the newly converted
Indians in specific family roles. The dominant assumption regarding the paternalism of the missionaries will be
questioned through an examination of the significance of female images in the mission discourse. The second part of
the paper will focus on the use of family-related language to describe the relationship between the newly founded
churches in India and the older churches in Europe. Emotional links were fostered when Indians and Europeans
referred to one another as brothers and sisters. At the same time godfather-godchild relationships were established.
The dynamic tension between equality and difference provides a basis for understanding these interrelations. By
foregrounding the ambivalence of family-based metaphors, this paper will contribute to a better understanding of the
theological complexity within the mission context.
8
9
SESSION 7B
Christian Marriage and Polygamy in the Writings of Mabel Shaw, 1915-1939
Rebecca C. Hughes, Seattle Pacific University
This paper will explore Mabel Shaw’s ideas and teachings on Christian marriage during her tenure with the London
Missionary Society at Mbereshi, Northern Rhodesia from 1915-1939. Shaw headed the Girls’ Boarding School there
and later opened a nursing clinic, the House of Life, in 1927. Although Shaw embarked for Africa with generally
more positive views of African culture than did her peers, she had absorbed Victorian concepts of African culture as
backwards and primitive. She promoted her work as educating young women not only into Christianity, but also into
Christian marriage, i.e., monogamy. However, as she became more accustomed to life in Northern Rhodesia and as
she became concerned that Western culture was eroding the stability of the African home in the late 1920s, she came
to defend polygamy as a viable option for African women. She was less concerned about the shape that African
marriage took than the stability that was afforded to African women through it. This paper examines how Shaw
justified her position through fulfilment theology and Christ’s teachings, rather than referring to Old Testament
examples. This paper will also consider how her ideas fit within the context of British evangelical ideas of Christian
marriage and divorce.
SESSION 8B
Two Missionary Wives: Rosalind Goforth and Lilian Dickson
Geoff Johnston, Presbyterian College Montreal
This paper compares two women of distinct but overlapping generations. Rosalind Goforth lived in China from 1888
to 1934, and Lillian Dickson was in Taiwan from 1927 until her death in 1984, except for the war years, when she
was in Guyana. Both women were married to career missionaries, Rosalind to Jonathon Goforth, a pioneer in North
Henan and in Manchuria, but best known as a revivalist, and Lillian to Jim Dickson, for many years Principal of
Taiwan Theological College in Taipei. Both men were missionaries of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, a church
which does not appoint wives as missionaries. If a wife was to make her name as a missionary she had to do it
without official institutional support. In Rosalind’s case it was as an author. Between 1921 and 1940 she published
five books, including a biography of her husband. She also published numerous letters in the church press. Two
things stand out about Rosalind’s work. Because she lacked formal institutional support she had to depend on
private donations, and they never seemed to let her down. Her work therefore has the flavour of a faith mission.
Secondly, she rarely wrote about herself. Although she often said that while Jonathon spoke to the men, she gathered
groups of women, in her writing she says very little about these women. Lillian Dickson, on the other hand, was a
free-lancer. She left her children at home when she returned to Taiwan after the war and spent her time filling in the
gaps in medical work in Taipei and then in numerous trips to the Taiwanese mountains, whose inhabitants had just
experienced a mass movement into Christianity. Unlike Rosalind, who was primarily interested in evangelism,
Lillian’s concerns extended to the whole person, especially to children. Toward the end of her life her work
expanded into an international charity called Mustard Seed International. Like Rosalind her work depended on
voluntary, private donations, but unlike Rosalind these gifts went to support her work, not her husband’s. Lillian’s
independent work began after World War II, when she had left her children in the USA. Lillian’s independence is
the most striking contrast between her and Rosalind.
SESSION 6B
Deconstructing the missionary wife: Mary Martin Richard
Andrew T. Kaiser, University of Edinburgh
Throughout the modern mission era, the prevailing understanding of the “missionary wife” has been to view the role
as a vocation distinct from that of the (male) missionary. For many overseas Christian workers, mission boards, and
supporting churches, married women on the field were first and foremost wives whose husbands just happened to be
missionaries. While in more recent years a growing number of male and female missionaries have begun to balk at
this characterization of married women in mission, several academic studies have also arisen to suggest that
historically this vocational distinction between the missionary husband and his accompanying wife has often been
less than absolute on the field. This paper will examine the life and ministry of Mary Martin Richard, 19th-century
missionary to China, and first wife of well-known Baptist missionary Timothy Richard. Analysis of her training
and entry into mission work, and especially her activities while on the field in China reveals that Mary Martin
Richard—like many other so-called missionary wives—is better understood as primarily a missionary who just
9
10
happened to be married as well. Regardless of prevailing attitudes at home or on the field, in practice Mary and
Timothy Richard shared to a remarkable degree their common calling and service as missionaries in China.
SESSION 6B
Poems of the Inner Palace: Divine Authority and the Treatment of Palace Women in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom
Carl Kilcourse, University of Manchester
Previous scholarship on the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) has presented Hong Xiuquan (the Taiping Heavenly King)
and his followers as the first modern liberators of Chinese women. Many historians have suggested that the Taipings’
belief in the spiritual brotherhood of humankind, which they acquired from translated Christian texts, led them to
reject the patriarchal system that had suppressed Chinese women since antiquity. The Taipings, in other words, were
using Christian egalitarianism to challenge Confucian hierarchy and patriarchy. This paper will problematise these
ideas and assumptions by discussing the Taipings’ theology and carefully examining one of their official
publications: the Poems of the Heavenly Father (1858), a collection of five hundred poems that were written for the
women of Hong’s palace. Whereas previous studies have pointed to the abolition of footbinding as evidence of the
Taipings’ commitment to gender equality, this paper will show that the judgement was actually the product of
Hakka ethnic customs and pragmatic revolutionary considerations. More importantly, the analysis will confirm that
the appointment of ‘female officials’ (nuguan) was not part of a formal Taiping policy to liberate women from the
constraints of domestic life. The Taipings’ official publications not only told women to accept the authority of males
(fathers, husbands, and sons) unconditionally, but also outlined the various domestic duties that Hong expected his
female officials to perform. The most noteworthy chores, which were discussed in the Poems of the Heavenly Father,
included grooming the Heavenly King, massaging various parts of his body (including his navel), and even pulling
his carriage. Such duties confirm that the Taipings were not liberating Chinese women, but simply imposing on
them a new form of domestic subservience.
SESSION 5A
“I married Latin America-I don’t want to divorce”: Catherine Padilla, integral mission, and the missionary family
David Kirkpatrick, University of Edinburgh
The marriage of Ecuadorian evangelical C. René Padilla (b. 1932) and American Catharine Feser (1932-2009) was,
from its inception, oriented toward the mission field. In a recent interview, René Padilla recalled proposing
marriage with the words, “If you accept my proposal, you marry not only me but Latin America [sic].” Feser
Padilla’s later decision prioritized mission and grounded her family within the Latin American context—in critical
continuity with missionary wives’ biographies of the 19 th and 20th centuries. Indeed, Ruth Padilla DeBorst,
missionary with Christian Reformed World Missions and Director of Christian Formation and Leadership
Development at World Vision International, called her parents’ marriage and family a “missiological covenant.”
Historiography has largely treated René Padilla as a solitary agent in the development and dissemination of integral
mission—Padilla is widely considered “the father of integral mission,” while Catharine is widely ignored. Groundbreaking research has begun to acknowledge the crucial role of both missionary wives and families in world
Christianity. Considering the work of Catharine Feser Padilla may provide crucial avenues for the study of the
origins, development and dissemination of integral mission. Similarly, how did Catharine influence René Padilla’s
own understanding of integral mission, as manifest in concepts of gender and the Kingdom of God? Through
literary analysis, archival documents, extensive interviews, and Spanish primary sources, this paper will seek to
uncover the influence of Catharine Feser Padilla upon integral mission through her three-fold role as missionary
wife, editor and professor.
SESSION 7B
The contribution of missions to the abuse of wives
Elizabeth Koepping, University of Edinburgh
Local, often unconscious, understanding of male and female informs people’s views irrespective of the imago dei. In
every country and context, this affects church teaching about and dealings with spousal violence, usually against
wives, and can indicate a failure to challenge context and ‘speak the Word of God.’ Missionaries from sending
nations such as the USA, UK, India and Korea, where married women were and still often are seen as subordinate to
husbands, naturally replicate such views in the mission field. One consequence is that that despite extolling family
10
11
life and opposing divorce, spousal violence among the missionized may either not be noticed or accepted as normal.
Leaving Genesis1:17 aside, how do missions and minsters read 1Peter 3:7?
SESSION 2A
Lost in transition: missionary children in the Basel Mission, 1837-1914
Dagmar Konrad, University of Basel, presented by Guy Thomas, Mission- 21
This paper examines the experiences of missionary children overseas, their enforced separation from their parents,
and their growing up in Europe, either in the Basel Mission’s children’s boarding house or with relatives.
SESSION 4B
"What can India learn from Japan?" Female education and women issues in the debates between Asian Christians
(and indigenous Christian elites from Asia and Africa) around 1910
Klaus Koschorke (Munich / Liverpool / Basel)
In 1906 - just one year after the Russian-Japanese war, when for the first time at the high-noon of European
colonialism an "oriental" nation in Asia had prevailed over an “occidental” one - a delegation of Japanese Christians
visited India. They had been invited by Indian Christians who wanted to learn how “India may profit from Japan”.
The answer given by the Japanese guests was: 1. get rid of Western denominationalism; 2. Self-government of the
Asian churches (instead of missionary control); 3. female education: "The Japanese encourage women to take part in
all social and religious matters". This visit led to mutual visits and intensified exchange between Japanese and
Indian Christians and critical self-evaluation by the latter ones. This paper presents a segment from a current
Munich-based research project dealing with trans-regional and transcontinental networks between indigenous
Christian elites from Asia and Africa around 1910.
SESSION 9A
Gospel, gender, and family: Protestant women and holy households in South China (1860—2000)
Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, Pace University in New York
Much has written about how Christianity improved the status of women in modern China through education, giving
them the necessary knowledge and skills to provide for themselves and move up the social ladder. But little attention
is paid to the interaction between women’s spiritual lives and Christian patriarchy. By examining the American
Baptist and Scottish Presbyterian missionary movements in South China’s Guangdong Province, this paper draws on
the church archival materials and local interviews to reveal a middle ground in which women exercised limited
agency to advance the gospel, to carve out their own socio-spiritual space, and to mediate between the sacred and
secular domains within the Christian families and lineages. It argues that a rather conservative theology of gender
and family embedded itself into the longstanding Chinese lineage ideology and gave rise to the ascendancy of
patriarchy in these denominations. Far from affirming the autonomous spiritual lives of women, this theology of
gender and family endorsed a vision of women’s subordination to husbands within the Christian households and to
male pastors inside the churches. The American Baptist and English Presbyterian missionary enterprises often
divided the lines of authority between men and women within the churches, and barred women from formal
leadership positions. Even though large numbers of women served as evangelists and took care of the congregations
in times of wars and disasters, the denominational churches seldom provided women with opportunities of
ministerial leadership.
SESSION 4A
Decentering the Mission: Exploring the role of the family in the American Protestant mission to Ottoman Syria,
1820-1860
Christine B. Lindner, Near East School of Theology
Research on the American Protestant mission to Ottoman Syria often traces the history of this encounter through
outlining the development of its major institutions: the church, schools and press in particular. While important in
providing an outline of the major events within this spiritual encounter, such works often marginalizes women, both
missionary and local, as well as the men who wrote little, while overlooking the interpersonal relations that shaped
the community. The aim of this presentation is to re-examine the early history of the Americans’ Syria Mission by
11
12
considering the importance of the family within this mission encounter and in shaping the Protestantism in the
region. This will be done by presenting my findings on mission families as ‘mosaic households’, which were
temporary arrangements whereby different Protestant families resided together under one roof. Mosaic households
were not necessarily segregated by race, nor did they uphold the divide between public/work and private/home.
Recent findings by Manktelow on contemporary LMS mission families in the South Pacific and South Africa, and
Abunnasr on the Syria Mission in the late nineteenth century, indicate that the mosaic households of the Syria
Mission during the early 19th century were unique responses to the challenges faced by the mission shaped by their
interpretations of gender, marriage and race relations within the Middle East context. While mosaic households
gradually disappeared, as the mission became more institutionalized and the culture of Ottoman Syria shifted,
remnants lingered, specifically the definition of Protestant ‘modern’ womanhood.
SESSION 2A
Making missionary children: religion, culture and juvenile deviance
Emily Manktelow, University of Kent
Over the course of the nineteenth-century c.10,000 evangelical missionaries were dispatched from Britain to spread
their faith, as well as their religious and cultural practices, around the globe. With the rise of the civilising mission,
the embodiment of the Christian message was increasingly an idealised and highly gendered version of the
missionary family. With families came children of course, and thus something of a dilemma for evangelical
missionaries: how to socialise their children into an evangelical vocation which depended on contact, conversation
and social and spiritual intimacy, while at the same time safeguarding the morals, religious convictions and physical
development of their children, which they saw as threatened by indigenous environments? Missionaries dealt with
this problem in two ways: by teaching their children the precepts of Christian love on the one hand, and cultural
superiority on the other. Socialising their children into both codes of conduct was potentially contradictory, but was
designed to safeguard the spiritual and temporal futures of children growing up in contexts viewed as ‘savage’ and
degrading. The object, in the words of the children themselves, was to keep them ‘from the filthy communications of
the ungodly natives, from those unblushing sights which shock our modesty’ and to associate them ‘with those who
while they seek to store our minds with useful knowledge aim to point us to the Lamb of God for life and peace.’
This was also highly gendered, with children socialised into codes of evangelical masculinity and femininity and
away from indigenous codes of gendered practice. This paper will focus on the making of missionary children,
primarily in the Pacific context, between the years c.1800-1850. It will explore the role of religion, culture and
resistance in the childhoods of evangelical children in the British religious world, and will situate the experience of
missionary children within idea(l)s of both gender and family in the missionary world. It will explore the ways in
which missionary parents sought to inculcate difference, and the ways children both ascribed to and resisted that
characterisation of their lives. As such it will explore religious and cultural education, juvenile deviance and moral
scrutiny in the missionary context, reflecting on both juvenile agency, and the history of inter-cultural interactions in
the missionary world.
SESSION 5A
Religion, gender and education: missionary childhoods in the West Indies, 1800-1870
Mary Clare Martin, University of Greenwich
Despite increasing interest in missionaries and their families, only limited research exists on missionaries’ children,
and even less on the West Indies. While Catherine Hall’s pioneering work focused on early 19th- century Baptist
missionaries, her primary focus was on relations of gender, class and race, and connections between colony and
metropole, rather than on childhood or “age”. Through the lens of missionary children’s experiences, this paper will
examine the implications of having a transatlantic identity and the connections between the West Indies and Britain,
against the background of slavery and abolition. It will draw on missionary memoirs, letters, and records of schools
attended by missionaries’ children, founded in Walthamstow in 1838 and 1842. Whereas Hall emphasised the
contradictions between the missionary dream and disillusionment after emancipation, micro-studies of missionary
communities suggest different narratives. The paper will refer, not only to the well-documented Baptist network, but
also the Methodists, exemplified by Samuel Shipman, son of Wesleyan missionaries, and subject of the memoir The
Missionary’s Child (1841), and also those attached to the LMS. Despite Hall’s emphasis on differentiated gender
roles, mothers’ and daughters’ education was considered very important within the Baptist mission community. Mrs
Thomas Henderson of British Guiana was commended by her husband for teaching the Sunday school from 8.a.m.
every week and for taking her four small children with her. Rebecca Wray, who also had a training in midwifery, ran
a fee-paying girls’ school which paid for her own children’s education, and her daughters worked in the school on
12
13
return from England from 1829. One of William Knibb’s daughters married Ellis Fray, a “coloured” minister, and
their mixed race children attended her alma mater, the Girls’ Mission school, from 1871. Such connections call in
question the arguments that missionary communities maintained rigid hierarchies of race and gender.
SESSION 8A
Festivals, Guests and Hosts in Urban Protestant Congregations
Mark McLeister, University of Edinburgh
Within the literature on Protestantism in China, few studies seek to trace changes in the way Protestantism has been
“done” in congregations at the local level from the missionary era through to the contemporary period. This study
attempts to fill some of this gap. Utilising original ethnographic data generated over an extended period of fieldwork
in a group of churches associated with the TSPM in a coastal city in China, this paper explores some of the changes
in how churches have interpreted the Protestant message. Of particular significance is that of the idiom of family
which has taken on an increased importance in the reform era for a number of reasons. This paper argues that as
these churches attempt to emphasise and function as a surrogate family, they also take on the traditional local
responsibility of “host”. It analyses case studies of the ways in which churches “host” in a range of ways. Of
particular interest is the role of congregations as hosts during festivals such as Christmas, Easter and Harvest
Thanksgiving as they seek to attract newcomers and spread their message. While “traditional gender” roles in these
church congregations are de-emphasised in the daily functioning of many aspects of the “church family”, traditional
gender roles are re-emphasised during these “church festivals”. This paper demonstrates that while traditional
gender roles are broadly not present in the “religious” activities of these congregations, the borrowed “secular”
traditions which have been re-invented for this specific Protestant context maintain a gendered dynamic. By
focussing on a local case study, this paper contributes to our understanding of Protestant congregations still seeking
to contextualise the Protestant message.
SESSION 2C
Methodological and theoretical perspectives in the historicity of African women
E. Phuti Mogase, Göttingen University
The history of West Africa predominantly lies in church records of missionaries and reports of colonial
administrators. It often goes without question that European and African men are the main actors in these accounts.
This (mis)representation of Africa downplays the female gender and has often been accepted as norm. African
history cannot be complete without the history of its women. One pertinent quest in mission studies should be to
provide methodological standards appropriate and adequate for fair representation. The project of re-writing African
history and rewriting African women’s history seems to be a subjective enterprise. Female historians in America
such as Joan Scott critique “the nature of historical evidence and historical experience and the role of narrative in the
writing of history”. While European female historians have begun seeking and questioning methodological or
theoretical issues of feminist history, yet according to Canning, there still remain the need to critique and redefine
‘the concepts of understanding family, gender, body, citizenship, class’, and experiences of African women who did
missionary work without recognition, through historical case studies. Who knows of the troubles of Mrs. Crowther,
the bishop’s wife, Mujola Agbebi’s wife who established the nationwide Baptist Women’s League in 1919,
Adelaide Casely Hayford, who was the first independent African school founder and principal, the Yaasentwa of
Ghana, and many other West African women whose names have been forgotten? This paper looks at the impact of
missionary work in English-speaking West Africa and the mission’s role in first, defining the history of West Africa,
secondly its influence on African life, Christianization and Europeanism, and lastly the challenge of re-writing the
history of African women in the history of West Africa.
SESSION 7A
The unravelling of a New Zealand missionary family: the Malcolms of the China Inland Mission
Hugh Morrison, University of Otago
This paper develops the concept of reflexive conversion by rethinking it in the context of a New Zealand missionary
family. It uses the image of a family’s identity becoming ‘unravelled’ in the aftermath of missionary involvement.
The Revd William Malcolm (Presbyterian minister) went to China with the China Inland Mission (CIM) in 1895,
where he married Anna Trudinger (a CIM missionary from a prominent South Australian evangelical family) in
1902. They had one son, Ron, and spent the majority of their time at Chefoo until their return to New Zealand in
1924. William returned to Presbyterian parish ministry until retirement in 1931. Through the 1930s William became
13
14
increasingly disaffected with the Church and established religion, committing himself to political reading and
embracing socialism. Anna retained her former commitment to Christian belief and involvement. Ron trained as a
teacher in New Zealand, but more significantly became both a convinced communist and a pacifist. During World
War 2 Ron was interned as a conscientious objector. During this period Ron corresponded extensively and
separately with both parents. The extant correspondence reveals a family that had strong emotional and physical
bonds, but which was increasingly splintered over religious and political issues. This paper explores this process,
asking among other things: to what extent the missionary experience (for parents and children) contributed to later
disaffection; how the return home to a very different socio-political landscape (post-World War 1) may have
impacted on a previously missions-framed faith; and how diverging discourses within a seemingly unified family
reflected implicit and explicit relational tensions. Overall this paper suggests that the missionary family unit offers a
useful lens through which to consider the reflexive impact of the missionary experience, and offers the family as a
still under-studied focus for early to mid-twentieth century missions’ history.
SESSION 5B
“Ask for leave of absence permanently”: Adele M. Fielde’s resignation from missionary service in late-nineteenthcentury South China
Nie Li, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Adele M. Fielde, once a single missionary of the American Baptist Missionary Union (ABMU), was known as a
feminist, a social activist, and a scientist in her old age. She was famous for her work in training Bible-women
during 1873-1889 in Swatow, South China. After laboring as a missionary teacher in the Orient for almost 25 years,
Fielde resigned from missionary service in November, 1889 and insisted that her connection with the ABMU should
be ended permanently in every respect before her return to America. Current research has already paid some
attention to her final “divorce” with her missionary career, but offers insufficient explanation. This paper seeks to
readdress this problem by focusing on the cultural and social difficulties she suffered in Swatow. According to
Fielde’s diary, her personal correspondence (not only her letter to ABMU and friends, but also the overseas letters
from ABMU to Fielde), books, articles and pamphlets, also referring to her co-workers’ correspondences and other
archives and record of ABMU, this paper reconstructs the changing process of Fielde’s attitude toward her work in
Swatow. It finds that the only public reason Fielde gave for resignation—a heart problem—may not be the major
reason, but rather the predicament she experienced leads her away from missionary work, that is, her deteriorated
health, her changing religious belief, gender bias at Swatow mission of ABMU, conflicts with co-workers, lack of
money and the disappointment to the number of converted Chinese.
SESSION 4C
The memorialisation of Mary Slessor in the Reformed PCN
Ngozi U. Emeka-Nwobia, Ebonyi State University, Abakaliki, Nigeria
In 2010 the Presbyterian church of Nigeria (PCN), formerly the Church of Scotland Mission, had a serious
animosity among its members over an outcry by the Mid - East Synod of manipulation, impending injustice, and
deprivation of its right to produce a new General Assembly Moderator. This led to power tussle, which resulted in
certain section of the church (the aggrieved members) seceding from the parent stock to form the Reformed
Presbyterian Church. Most religious instruments, logo and uniform associated with the old PCN were changed with
the exception of the legacy of Mary Slessor drawn in the uniform material (wrapper) worn by the Women Guild.
This motivated our interest to probe into the reason for that. This work sets out to explore the following; what is the
new perception of Mary Slessor by 21st century Eastern Nigerian women, particularly members of the Reformed
Presbyterian church of Nigeria (RPCN)? What memories do they have of her? How is /was her status as an
unmarried missionary perceived in a culture where unmarried adult women are viewed as social outcast? What is the
role and status of women in the PCN and Reformed Presbyterian Church? What are the activities of the RPCN and
their perception about the family?
SESSION 2B
The “Peculiar Case” of Betsey Stockton: Gender, Race, and Role of an Assistant Missionary to the Sandwich
Islands (1822-1825)
14
15
Alice T. Ott, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois
In Ashbel Green’s recommendation for Betsey Stockton to the ABCFM, he candidly admitted that “there is
something peculiar in her case.” Betsey was a young, freed African American slave, who had been educated in the
Green household, had experienced a convincing conversion, and now desired to serve as a missionary to the
Sandwich Islands. Mr. Green’s purpose in his letter to the ABCFM was to ensure that Betsey’s racial background
would not result in her being viewed merely as a servant. He recommended that she be attached to the Charles
Stewart family, and provide them with domestic help. Nevertheless, she should also to be considered a missionary
and teacher in her own right, able “to ameliorate the condition of the heathen generally, & especially to bring them
to the saving knowledge of the truths as it is in Jesus.” Betsey’s ensuing ambiguity within the mission family was
reflected in Green’s suggestion that she “be regarded & treated neither as an equal nor as a servant but as a humble
Christian friend.” The “peculiar case” of Betsey Stockton provides a unique nexus of gender, race and role. Like all
missionary women with the ABCFM, Betsey was an “assistant missionary.” She had considerable domestic work,
but so did her married “sisters” in the Sandwich Islands mission. Her single status gave her more time for
significant and rewarding ministry as a teacher at Lahaina, Maui than many of the married sisters experienced. As
the first African American missionary of the ABCFM, Betsey keenly felt her difference and isolation from others on
the field. Hints of loneliness and depression lace much of her correspondence. Unlike other single female
missionaries of the ABCFM, who often married soon after arrival on the field, Betsey remained single. When the
Stewart family returned to the United States in 1825 due to Mrs. Stewart’s ill health, Betsey accompanied them,
although her contract with the ABCFM would have allowed her to stay on as a missionary. In this paper, the author
will utilize Stockton’s journal and correspondence, as well as the journals and letters of significant friends, to tease
out how her gender, race and role in the mission affected her experience during her short missionary career.
SESSION 2C
Women’s role in conflict mediation and sustainable building of peaceful relations in Ghana
Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, Central University College, Ghana
Conflicts have had devastating effects on African societies in the past decades, particularly women and children who
are considered the most vulnerable hence suffer most in these societies. Even so, women have been largely excluded
from formal conflict mediation and peace talks. Yet, their presence and activities in post conflict reconstruction
cannot be ignored. Therefore, women now demand an equitable presence at peace negotiations, planning and
operation of humanitarian interventions. Women passionately desire sustainable peace and are very well suited to
work towards its achievement. The paper discusses women’s role in mediation and peace building, particularly the
role of women religious leaders, Queen mothers and other prominent women in Ghana. For the religious women the
paper looks at the role of four female Muslim traditional rulers in the Northern region of Ghana, a former female
representative of the Christian Council of Ghana with outstanding experience in peace and reconciliation work and
few other examples of female participation in conflict mediation from both the Christian and traditional backgrounds
in Ghana. The paper argues that lasting peace cannot be achieved without the participation of women and the
inclusion of their perspectives and participation in peace processes. This is because women play a significant role in
making the transition from the culture of violence to the culture of peace.
SESSION 2B
We are ugly, but we are here: African American women and world missions
Yolanda Pierce, Princeton Theological Seminary
At the end of American slavery, during what historians term the “nadir” of African American history, an
unprecedented number of African American women began service on the international Christian mission field.
American history scarcely records their names or the impact of their service, but defying 19th century social, cultural,
racial, and gender conventions, African American women worked as missionaries throughout the world, most
notably within countries in Africa, Europe, and Southern Asia. While their voices and presence were excluded from
the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910, their labors and struggles were transformative in the lives
of the people they served, both in the international and the local context. In their refusal to submit to the politics of
respectability, these 19th-century African American women embraced world missions as their vocational calling and
Christian duty, and also as their strategy for racial uplift. By profiling the lives of three 19th-century African
American women missionaries (George, Delaney, and Randolph) this paper will attend to three major themes: 1)
broadening and complicating our understanding of the intersections of race and gender in world missions; 2)
15
16
examining the theological and secular motivations for African American women’s ministerial labors; 3) and
suggesting how 19th Century African American missionary women may yet provide a model for contemporary
service in world missions.
SESSION 9B
A South Seas missionary extended family
Andrew Robson, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
My research into the life of Robert Louis Stevenson in the South Seas (especially Samoa) has introduced me to a
number of his missionary friends and associates, especially the Revd Samuel James Whitmee (1838-1925). He was
a fascinating figure – a linguist , a botanist, a traveller, a man with an open and ever-curious mind - who helped
RLS to learn the Samoan language, translated some of his stories into Samoan, and who came to share many of
RLS’s political sympathies with regard to foreign interference in Samoan affairs. Whitmee was married twice, and
through these marriages he was related to other LMS missionary families, including William Mills, George Turner,
and George Cousins. These individuals were all LMS missionaries in Samoa, and Turner and Cousins were both
significant authors. Turner was especially important as one of the founders of the institute at Malua, where many
Samoans were trained and prepared for missionary work throughout the islands. Whitmee admired the work of
Samoan “teachers” throughout the islands. I would like to provide an outline of the intertwined lives of these people,
paying particular attention to their lives in Samoa.
SESSION 7A
More than Wives
Cathy Ross, Ripon College, Cuddesdon
Jane Austen pertinently observed that history consisted of “the quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilence
on every page; the men so good for nothing and hardly any women at all.” Feminist historians within the church
resonate with Jane Austen’s remarks as they have also repeatedly encountered the issue of women’s invisibility in
church history. It is as though women have trained a camera lens through the ages of the church and have found the
women missing. As Patricia Hill has commented, “The women have simply disappeared.” However, it is not that
women were absent from church history – women have always been there – but rather that history has been written
from a particular standpoint from which women were often excluded. This paper attempts to refocus the camera, to
train the lens on four women: Charlotte Brown, Anne Wilson, Elizabeth Colenso and Catherine Hadfield, who were
all Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary wives. Their husbands were missionaries with the CMS and were
recorded in the CMS Register as such. Their wives were not as they were not considered to be missionaries.
“Missionary work…was clearly perceived as a task performed by men that women merely supplemented.
Missionary was a male noun; it denoted a male actor, male action, male spheres of service.” However, Jocelyn
Murray has made clear in her research on the CMS that long before any women were officially accepted, unmarried
women as well as wives were serving overseas. From the beginning the CMS encouraged its men to go as married
men with families in order to be able to model pious domesticity and the ideal Christian family. It was often this
Victorian ideology, which worked for and against women. On the one hand it accorded them a special role as
civilisers within the home and gave them a status as morally superior to men. On the other hand, it was this role
within the home intimately tied up with domestic and childcare responsibilities, which often limited their availability
for mission work outside the home. For the CMS, rooted in evangelical theology and piety, personal vocation and
calling could transcend gender and therefore work in the wives’ favour at times. This paper will consider how far
these four women were indeed more than wives.
SESSION 6C
The ‘missionary culture’ and the female public sphere in Wales, 1880-1930
Gwennen Schiavone, Independent Researcher
In the period between 1880 and 1930, the majority of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist missionaries active in North
East India were women. Consequently - and although their role in the governing of the foreign mission was limited,
from the turn of the century, and increasingly in the period thereafter, the female missionaries became the mission’s
most prominent public figures at home. In the monthly missionary journals, their correspondence strikingly accounts
for the majority of the printed articles and photographs; and whilst on furlough, due to the demands of the home
church and the intensity of their scheduled public, they became what may be considered female ‘celebrities’ and
‘role models’ to their audience. As ‘soldiers’ at the vanguard of the mission to “save souls”, they were shown to be
brave, self-sacrificing women of achievement, women who were worthy of admiration and support. The women of
the church were called to ‘aid their Indian sisters in their need’, and the ideal of ‘sisterhood’ was further promoted in
16
17
the call to support their ‘Welsh blood sisters’ – ‘their’ representatives’ in the field. The female missionaries
addressed their female audience as a bond of unity, and in so doing, they challenged their ‘sisters’ at home to be
revolutionary. Responding to the call, they formed themselves into a nationwide network of ‘Women’s Societies’ for
the support of the foreign mission. By 1930 the network exceeded 400 branches. This paper will address the way in
which the female missionaries opened an imaginative new world to their audience at home, and the way in which
they themselves were presented as figures of admiration – as women to be admired, and as ‘role models’ to be
emulated. It will discuss the way the notion of ‘sisterhood’ was adopted to create a sense of connection between the
women on the missionary field and their supporters at home, and the way this sense of ‘responsibility’ created a new
sphere of public activity for the women within the church. This gateway was a result of practical requirements - the
opportunities created, however, were beyond that.
SESSION 2B
Wilmina Rowland Smith: SVM Travelling Secretary and missions educator
Johanna Selles, Emmanuel College, University of Toronto
Wilmina Rowland (1908-1999), graduate of Wilson College, served three years as a teacher of missionary children
in China before returning to become a travelling secretary with the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM). In her role
as SVM secretary Rowland visited colleges throughout the southern United States speaking to local SVM groups or
churches about missions. Her itinerary included historical Black colleges and universities, as well as white colleges.
This paper will explore Rowland’s SVM work through the lens of gender, noting that class, race and religion were
also important components of her identity. Using the unpublished diary that Rowland kept during her time as an
SVM secretary (1934-35), this paper will investigate Rowland’s experience. As Rowland navigated diverse contexts
and audiences, her observations provide a rich insight into college life in the southern United States in the 1930s.
SESSION 5B
Aging and Making Gendered Space in Mission Communities
Rhonda Semple, St Francis Xavier University Antigonish, Canada
It is almost a truism now that the understanding of the work and impact of western missions was incomplete without
an analysis of the role of the ‘peri-professional’ woman. That these women were central to shaping the mission
project, not only through mission work given shape by their western feminine upbringing, but also through their
lived example of Christian femininity, is a powerful argument. It is one that has been further enriched by including
female converts in the imperial/colonial setting, and even more recently, and by analyzing constructions of
manliness and masculinities in the modern period. It is well analyzed that women’s gendered identities have been
centrally organized relationally – ever single/married – and around life stages, as daughters and sisters, mothers,
and then widowed. There is an additional recognition that the ‘exceptional’ unmarried women who challenged this
trajectory contributed centrally to mission projects, particularly for Protestant missions beginning in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century. Relatively less scholarly attention has been paid to gender and aging in the life cycle of a
female missionary. There is evidence that, for a variety of reasons, a cohort of older women applied to be
missionaries independent of a male relative, and that societies recognized their professional trajectory would be
different than that of younger candidates. And it was. With an ability to resist, the supervision and oversight of
senior colleagues, the professional and personal maturity of such women enabled such women to travel and work in
ways their dependent colleagues could not and they were involved in remarkable work as a result. But further to this,
either freed from gendered encumbrances of being wife, mother, then grandmother, or living without the support of
family, these women tended to work past their middle years and into their elder years, and in arranging support for
their own coming infirmity, some such women’s elder years were filled with the ‘projects’ of creating homes for
themselves and fellow older women, and they continued to preach, travel and work alongside, and work within faith
communities until their deaths. Without the support of their own biological relatives, their work focused faith
communities that became ‘family’. This paper will analyze the experience of gender and aging in Protestant
missions, focusing on the elder lived examples of Christian femininity offered by exceptional women in the LMS
and the C of S in north India between 1880 and 1920.
SESSION 8B
17
18
“To have ‘bit and bridle’ laid upon her”: the disciplining of Miss Mary Pigot, Lady Superintendent of the Church of
Scotland’s Female Mission in Calcutta, 1870-1883
Rosemary Seton, School of Oriental & African Studies London
Mary Pigot, Lady Superintendent of the Church of Scotland’s Female Mission in Calcutta between 1870 and 1883,
was acknowledged by all to be one of the most successful female agents in that mission’s history. Born and educated
in India she had been appointed by the Rev Macalister Thomson, Secretary of the Corresponding Board in Calcutta
which was responsible for local management of the Church of Scotland’s missions, in consultation with the Foreign
Mission Committee in Edinburgh. Despite being appointed locally Pigot was readily accepted by the Ladies’
Association in Scotland which funded her work of Christian education. Between 1875 and 1876 she visited Scotland,
attending and speaking at more than forty meetings of the Ladies’ Association, greatly increasing support for the
female mission in the process. On returning to India she continued to develop the work so that by 1882 the mission
had more female pupils than any other mission in Calcutta. However, a year later she was summarily dismissed. My
paper examines the reasons for her dismissal, focussing in particular on her relations with the Corresponding Board
in Calcutta and the Ladies’ Association in Edinburgh.
SESSION 5B
The story of Hangchow Girls’ School retold
Hong Shen, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
It is well known that Hangchow Girls’ School (贞才女学) set up by the American Presbyterian Mission, South, back
in 1867 was the first modern school for girls in the capital of Zhejiang Province, China. In 1912, this school merged
with two other missionary girls’ schools to form a more famous Hangchow Union School for Girls. Among the
graduates of this latter school, there were quite a few celebrities who made great contributions to the building of a
modern China. Unfortunately, in the latter half of the 20th century, missionary studies were a taboo topic in
mainland China. Due to the repeated political movements during this period, many of the original records about
Hangchow Girls’ School have either been destroyed or scattered. Now, when we try to look back to the history of
this school, we are sad to realize that we know next to nothing about it. From August 2010 to July 2011, the author
of this paper spent a whole year doing research in U.S. university libraries and missionary archives and found
archival materials relating to Hangchow Girls’ School in Dukes University Rare Book Library, the Burke Library of
Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, Yale Divinity Library, and elsewhere. The present paper
aims to retrace and reconstruct the history of Hangchow Girls’ School on the basis of these first-hand materials, and
to answer the following three questions: 1) Why did the Southern Presbyterian Mission want to set up this girls’
school? 2) Who exactly ran this school and how did the school grow? 3) Why and how did this school eventually
merge with other schools？It will be an enlightening experience for the people of Hangzhou to hear the story of this
Presbyterian Hangchow Girls’ School retold.
SESSION 6C
Selling the missionary family: How British mission organizations marketed
missions by showcasing missionary families
Lane Sunwall, University of Wisconsin
Missionary families were not only crucial to the missionary work done in mission stations around the world; they
were the bedrock of missionary marketing efforts in the home country. In magazines and pamphlets, pictures and
home movies, missionary organizations made constant use of missionary families to sell their work to the public.
Showcasing the missionary family provided a warm, familiar face to the mission organization people supported.
Family testimonials about life at the mission station could be easily targeted to different demographics according to
contemporary stereotypes; tales of mechanical woes and the family car targeted to men, stories of household
tribulations in a far-away country aimed at women, even letters written by missionary children could be featured in
missionary periodicals targeted towards the youth. Missionary families thus provided organizations a ready source
of marketing material to show people back home what their contributions were buying and allowed people to
empathize with what was going on in the mission station. Using the archives and publications of the Church
Missionary Society for support, this presentation will explore how missionary organizations utilized the missionary
family to promote and sell their work to the British public in the early post-War era (1945-1970). This presentation
is part of my dissertation exploring how mission organizations continued their work even as British religious
observance steeply declined in the post-War era. I argue that post-War British mission organizations well
understood their dilemma; British society appeared to be leaving them behind and they could not survive by
continuing to rely upon regular church attenders, their traditional group of supporters. Instead, mission organizations
18
19
needed to attract the support of the growing number of British who did not regularly participate in church as well as
those who were indifferent to Christianity. To do this mission groups appealed to broader cultural values and
interests (such as humanitarianism, peace activism, or even 1950s social conservatism), in marketing campaigns
aimed at the non-church attending public. I argue that these organizations were successful in rebranding themselves,
and that by doing so they survived even as British culture increasingly secularized. Missionary families served as an
important cornerstone of this marketing effort, frequently used to demonstrate that missionaries were regular,
contemporary people serving God and helping others. If regular people could be so inspired to serve overseas,
certainly the reader back home could be persuaded to help them in that noble effort.
SESSION 7B
The missionary home – a man’s place? Norwegian Lutheran missionaries in 19th century South-East Africa
Kristin Fjelde Tjelle, School of Mission and Theology, Stavanger, Norway
The metaphor ‘separate spheres’ has had an enormous influence on how historians have explained gender relations
in nineteenth-century western, industrialised societies. The private or domestic sphere of the family and household
belonged to women and the public sphere belonged to men. This paper, which will present a study of nineteenthcentury Norwegian (NMS) missionaries in South Africa from a masculinity perspective, challenges the separatesphere-theory and claims that the missionary home was in fact also a man’s sphere. First, the father’s influence, as
well as his labour, in the missionary home was considerable in the first decades of the Norwegian mission enterprise.
Second, although the fundamental mission strategy of ‘Christian home-making’ was the responsibility of the
missionary wives, this does not mean that the missionary home and mission station area were the domain of the
wives alone — quite the reverse. The Missionary Home was definitely a ‘Man’s Place’, but this paper moreover
asks how well it actually was suited for the missionary children. In most Western missionary organisations the
practice of sending missionary children to boarding schools in the home country or in the host country eventually
developed. The missions established institutions to function as substitute homes for missionary children. Historians
have accentuated the widespread gendered mission strategy of constructing Christian homes on the borders of
civilisation, but very few have commented on the fact that the missionaries’ own children disappeared from their
parental homes. It is a paradox, then, that in the efforts to export the concept of Western Christian homes to nonChristian areas of the world, ‘the lack of a nuclear family life’ came to characterise the missionaries’ own privacy.
SESSION 8A
Bathsheba as an object lesson: gender, modernity, and biblical examples in Wang mingdao’s sermons and writings
Gloria Tseng, Hope College
In a 1935 short article, “Lessons from Bathsheba,” Wang Mingdao, a renowned indigenous preacher of Republican
China, exhorted his female readers to avoid many of the new fashion trends of his day—sleeveless and tight dresses,
high heels, sandals, nail polish, facial makeup, permanents, and so forth. He prefaced his remarks on these popular
trends with an exposition and application of the Biblical account of Bathsheba and King David: “Because Bathsheba
bathed in a place that could be seen by others, she became the fuse to set David’s sin on fire. Even though the
modern women of our day do not bathe in a place where they can be seen, but their power to tempt men to sin might
be even greater than Bathsheba’s.” In Wang Mingdao Wenku, a seven-volume collection of Wang’s sermons and
writings, of which this short article is a part, there are a total of twenty articles, sermons, or allegorical stories
dealing specifically with women, marriage, gender, or family relations: six from the 1930s, thirteen from the 1940s,
and one from 1950. They span Wang’s most productive years, and some deal with issues specific to China’s
dramatic social changes in the Republican era, such as concubinage and widowhood. As most scholarship on Wang
Mingdao focuses on his battle against modernist theology and resistance to the Chinese Communist regime, this
aspect of Wang’s teachings has not received much scholarly attention. One sees in Wang’s writings and sermons on
matters of marriage, gender, and family relations a concrete example of the indigenization of Christianity in China, a
process complicated by China’s encounter with Western modernity.
SESSION 6B
Enlisting the Family in Missions in Korea
Elizabeth Underwood, Eastern Kentucky University
The study of family in the Western missionary movement has been primarily examined in terms of those on the field,
specifically the role of missionary wives or examination of multi-generational missionary families. This narrow
19
20
definition of family fails to capture the broader role that family played in missions, beyond those who were
appointed to and present on the mission field. It is well known, for example, that Horace Underwood’s work in
Korea was financially supported by his industrialist brother, John T. Underwood. But the typewriter magnate’s role
in Korean missions was far more than that of a source of funding. Virtually all missionaries enlisted the aid of their
family at home to help to spread news of their work, raise funds, and solicit prayer. Some family even came to the
field, not as missionaries themselves, but on their own, to help their family in their homes and beyond. In this paper
I seek to use two examples of Korea missionary families to explore these broader dimensions of missionary family.
Using family letters I will discuss Horace Underwood’s efforts to enlist his siblings’ active help in supporting the
fledgling Korea mission at the turn-of-the-twentieth century. The unpublished diary of Emma Harpster, mother of
Pyongyang missionary Lenore Harpster Lutz, details the 18 months she spent in Korea with her daughter’s family
and the ways in which she engaged with the mission and its work in the late 1920s. These two examples, I will argue,
are not unique, but rather illustrative of the multiple ways in which missions were truly family endeavors.
SESSION 9B
Being Fruitful for the Lord: A gendered tale of “kinship in Christ” from colonial Zimbabwe, 1955 to 1969
Wendy Urban-Mead, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
My research on the Brethren in Christ Church in Zimbabwe since its inception in 1896 has explored themes similar
to those of this year’s Yale-Edinburgh Conference, as seen in my interest in “the unconventional and surrogate
families” found on the foreign mission field, as well as “the norms of gender and marriage and family in other
societies”. In a chapter I wrote for Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant
Empire, 1812-1960, an important theme was “kinship in Christ.” In that paper I focused on two young unmarried
African men who claimed kinship with a host of people in a place very far away, that they had never seen, and never
would see, by means of letters they wrote to the American members of the sending church. There were three
grounds on which they did this: first, because of the Christian habit of referring to fellow believers as “brothers and
sisters in Christ.” Secondly, they both regarded their teacher, missionary H. Frances Davidson, as something of a
mother figure, and she regarded them as “her boys.” There was also the indigenous pattern of naming among the
Ndebele people, whereby fictive kin relationships were and are often adopted. In this paper I extend these elements
in the building of fictive “kinship in Christ” in colonial Zimbabwe among missionaries and African members of the
Brethren in Christ Church by focusing on the work of the Rev. Sandey Vundhla, an evangelist, ordained Minister,
and church planter of the 1950s and 1960s. The paper will look at his marriage to Dazzie Moyo, with particular
focus on the couple’s inability to have children, and his strong bond in Christian brotherhood with missionary
Bishop Arthur Climenhaga. Both Vundhla and Climenhaga looked to “being fruitful for the Lord” – winning others
to Christ -- to compensate for their lack of children. (Climenhaga’s marriage was also childless.) This case allows
for elaboration on themes of the gendered understandings of kinship both within blood families and within the
fictive but compelling bonds of “kinship in Christ.” Power dynamics of the colonial setting also affect the way the
story of Vundhla’s ministry and two kinds of kinship played out over the course of his life, and will be discussed in
this paper.
SESSION 9A
The role of women in evangelism during the Chinese Home Mission Movement (1918-1955)
Marina Xiaojing Wang, Chinese Culture Research Centre, China Graduate School of Theology, Hong Kong
The Chinese Home Missionary Society [CHMS] was established in 1918, and aimed to spread Christian faith to
remote and ‘unevangelised’ areas in China. Considered to be the first nationwide Christian movement launched by
Chinese Christians, directed by Chinese brains and supported by Chinese funds, the CHMS and its Home Mission
Movement deserves exploration within the context of the study of Christianity in China, for it demonstrated a
profound attempt at realising Chinese Christians’ ambitions of self-propagation with an inter-denominational
character, as well as a growing consciousness of the ‘self-hood’ of the Chinese Church. It should be noted that
women played a very noticeable part in this movement. The CHMS was originated at a conference for Englishspeaking Christian leaders on personal evangelism in Guling, 1918, where a desire to evangelise China was
expressed by a number of Chinese delegates and missionaries, mainly female. Hu Suzhen 胡素貞 (Katie Woo) of
Hong Kong, Cai Sujuan 蔡蘇娟 of Nanjing, Shi Meiyu 石美玉 (Mary Stone) of Jiujiang, Song Faxiang 宋發祥 of
Beijing, these four women Christian leaders proposed to establish this home mission during the conference.
20
21
Furthermore, female missionaries were taking a lead in the movement in educational and individual evangelism.
One of the most remarkable examples was Chen Yuling 陳玉玲, who established the Xiaguan parish mission work
in Yunnan on her own. This paper aims to examine the historical accounts of the activities of Christian women in the
CHMS and its Home Mission Movement, in order to explore their role in evangelism in early twentieth-century
China through this movement. This paper also attempts to form an analysis as to why so many Christian women
were active in CHMS and its mission work.
SESSION 6A
Gender and family in the CMS Ruanda Mission and its impact on understandings of gender, sexuality, and family
life in the East African Revival
Kevin Ward, University of Leeds
The Ruanda Mission was distinctive, in the history of the Church Missionary Society, in having close family ties
embedded in its structure and policy, theological outlook and fund raising. The ‘founders’ of the Ruanda Mission,
Stanley Smith and Sharp, were themselves brothers-in-law, and family networks were essential as support structures
for the nascent mission. The mission had a special concern for the nurture and education of missionary children, and
this produced a comparatively large number of second and third generation missionaries. The mission had a special
concern for the nurture and education of missionary children, and this produced a comparatively large number of
second and third generation missionaries. Many subsequent Ruanda missionaries were connected by kinship or
marriage bonds. The idea of the mission as itself a ‘family’ characterised the development of the mission in its first
40 years of existence, from 1920-1960; it often shaped the conflicts within the mission, not least in support of, or
opposition to, the emerging revival movement. The mission also wished to provide norms of sexual behaviour and
family patterns for the emerging Christian community, and in particular among the ‘aboluganda’ (the brethren and
sisters) of the revival movement. The paper will examine the ways in which the East African Revival and the church
at large accepted or critiqued these norms, in the life of the local church and revival fellowship.
SESSION 4A
Arab women & Protestant missions: gendered practices of reading, writing, and preaching in Ottoman Syria, 18701914
Deanna Ferree Womack, Princeton Theological Seminary
This paper highlights the contributions of Syrian women to the American Syria Mission and Arab Protestantism in
Ottoman Syria (present day Syria and Lebanon). First, I examine the work of Syrian women who served the
American mission through literary endeavors (writing and translating for the mission press in Beirut) and direct
evangelism (as lecturers and Bible women). I draw upon the missionary periodical al-Neshra al-‘usbuiyya (The
Weekly Bulletin), an under-utilized resource that preserves Syrian Protestant women’s writings on religious and
cultural topics. Because Al-Neshra printed notices of public lectures, women’s meetings, and obituaries, it also
offers a window into the lives of Syrian women who left no written record, but who read and explained the Gospel
in Syrian homes, churches, schools, and medical clinics. Second, I consider the circumstances of marital status,
social position, and family ties that enabled Syrian women to work as writers, Bible readers, and de-facto preachers.
Single, widowed, and divorced women were most likely to work for the mission, but other women found
opportunities to participate in the evangelistic and literary work of male family members. Third, I compare the
activities of Syrian women and the American women missionaries who often served as their role models. This
exercise will shed light on the ways that gender norms and practices translated cross-culturally. It will also reveal the
differences in status afforded to American women who claimed equal right to the title “missionary” long before
Bible women became known instead as women “evangelists,” making them equal in name with their Syrian male
counterparts. While examining how Syrian women negotiated religious and cultural expectations in their reading,
writing, and preaching of the Gospel, this paper also reveals the gendered dimensions of the dichotomy between
foreign missions and local evangelism.
SESSION 4A
Misinterpretations of a missionary policy and its impact on questioning the masculinity of Syrian Protestant
converts
Uta Zeuge, Humboldt-University of Berlin
The paper focuses on the Syria Mission of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission, conducted
between 1819 and 1870 in Ottoman Syria. The missionary policy regarding native ministry caused a variety of
21
22
problems, not only related to the realization of the policy, but also to its interpretations by American missionaries in
the field. Missionaries with different attitudes on piety and spirituality, and how these entities should be rated,
retarded the development of a flourishing native Protestant community. Highly educated Syrians who were
considered as candidates for the native ministry, encountered a strict call for evidences of piety, measured by North
American Protestant standards. As a result, there were many disappointed hopes and fears of being cut off from the
new native Protestant community. My presentation will explore this topic by considering two famous Syrian
Protestants: Butrus al-Bustani and John Wortabet. As Arab and Armenian Protestant men respectively, Bustani and
Wortabet occupied (according to the missionaries) an ambiguous position as Christians but not quiet equals. The
missionaries’ questioning of these men’s strong theological knowledge and ability to conduct a congregation can
also be read as challenges to their masculinity. By examining the inner and outer conflicts in the biographies of these
two men I will show how Bustani and Wortabet negotiated the complex and multiple pressures on their identity as
intellectuals and incumbents of high positions.
SESSION 4B
Hannah Kilham and the gender issue: the place of females in the liberated African villages in Sierra Leone
Victor Zizer, Akrofi-Kristaller Institute, Ghana
This paper examines how Kilham and her educational approach for Africans contributed to redefine the place of
females in the Christianisation process of Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone. The paper looks at some of the
Colonial Government regulations or policies for Liberated Africans in 19 th-century Sierra Leone to see how they
served to define the place of females in the Liberated African villages. The slave trade and slavery in Africa had
largely divided and disrupted families and communities in West Africa. It was no respecter of persons. Africans,
male and female, suffered alike under the dehumanising clutches of the slave trade. The creation of a Settlement in
Sierra Leone to receive and resettle freed slaves known as Liberated Africans or recaptives, presented an opportunity
to rebuild their lives, recreate their lost families and communities, as well as restore their dignity and identity. Living
conditions and general welfare of the recaptives remained a constant challenged and concern for the founders of the
Settlement, the Colonial Government, and collaborating agencies and other individuals. Various groups and
individuals offered different forms of intervention to mitigate these challenges. Hannah Kilham, a 19 th-century
English Quaker, was one such person who was committed to the cause of the Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone.
She, like other agents, believed that education played a major role to introduce Christianity to Africans, to civilise
them, and to promote acceptable commerce among them. Unlike them, she maintained that for education to be
meaningful to Africans, it must be offered through the medium of their own languages. She designed a system of
instruction and established a school for Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone to promote her ideas. She concentrated
on females because of the disparity she saw between them and their male counterparts in educational provisions in
the villages. Kilham’s approach contributed to the work of other agencies and directed them to the significance of
focusing on girls’ education.
22