Academic literature on the topic 'Women in missionary work'

The literature dealing with those women and men who dedicated themselves to teaching the newly freed slaves in the South during Reconstruction has grown considerably in recent years. From W. E. B. DuBois's Black Reconstruction in America in 1935, with its positive depiction of the role of these teachers through Henry L.ee Swint's 1941 work, The Northern Teacher in the South, with its negative stereotype to more recent works, we now have a body of literature which has begun to examine this group in a more thorough and complex manner.1 The general stereotype which often appears in the literature is of the missionar teacher as a white woman from New England, fresh from the abolitionist movement. While it is true that many teachers fit into this category, there were also many African-American teachers and missionaries, both women and men.2 A good deal of the literature has dealt, at least briefly, with the ways in which African-American men functioned in the context of such organizations as the American Missionary Association (AMA). However, the experience of these men was different from that of African- American women, in part because these men were more likely to be givenadministrative positions in the organizations, either as principals, field agents, or supported missionaries. Most of the women, then, were more likely to remain “in the trenches” as teachers during their tenure with the missionary society.3

AbstractAlthough there is a large, sophisticated literature on gender and mission work, single women still remain on the periphery of those studies. Through the case of Martha L. Moors, a single American missionary working in Portuguese West Africa (Angola today) in the 1920s, this essay offers an examination of how the two identities of 'single woman' and 'missionary' affected mission culture and work. Single women occupied a tenuous position, as they were often called upon to instruct non-Christian women on the principles of Christian marriage and motherhood. Moors' writings allow for an intimate consideration of how single women fit into mission culture and their reflections of how they serve the missions. Single women had to support the missions in ways that exemplified Christian femininity while lacking the validity of being wives and mothers. Quoique les études sur le genre et la mission soient nombreuses et sophistiquées, les travaux portant sur des femmes célibataires restent marginaux. En étudiant la trajectoire de Martha L. Moors, une missionnaire américaine célibataire ayant travaillé dans les années 1920 en Afrique de l'Ouest Portugaise (aujourd'hui Angola), cet article se penche sur la façon dont les catégories identitaires de « femme célibataire » et de « missionnaire » ont influé sur la culture et le travail des missions. Les femmes célibataires occupaient une place précaire dans la mesure où elles étaient souvent appelées à enseigner à des femmes non-chrétiennes les principes chrétiens du mariage et de la maternité. Les écrits de Moors nous offrent témoignage intime sur l'insertion des femmes célibataires dans la culture de la mission et sur leurs réflexions quant au meilleur moyen de servir celle-ci. Les femmes célibataires devaient soutenir l'effort missionnaire en devenant des exemples de féminité chrétienne tout en ne pouvant pas se prévaloir de la qualité d'épouse et mère.

The Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS) (1897–1909) and the Woman’s Missionary Council (WMC) (1910–1940) of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS) worked in Korea from 1897 to 1940. Their work used a distinctive mission philosophy, hermeneutics, and implementation of strategies in their encounters with Korean women. Over the course of their years in Korea, Southern Methodist missionary women initiated the Great Korea Revival, established the first social evangelistic centers, educated the first indigenous female church historian, and ordained women for the first time in Korea. This article argues that, even though the missionary activities of the single female missionaries occurred in the context of “Christian civilization” as a mission theory, their holistic Wesleyan missiology departed from the colonial theory of mission as civilization. The first section of the article offers background information regarding the single female missionaries to help understand them. What motivated these females to venture in foreign lands with the Gospel? What was their preparation? The second section presents the religious, cultural, social, and political background of Korea during the time the missionaries arrived. The third section describes and analyzes the evangelistic and social ministries of the female missionaries in the nascent Korean mission. The final section describes and analyzes the appropriation and reinterpretation of the Bible and Christianity by Korean women, especially the work of Korean Bible women and Methodist female Christians in the quest for independence from Japanese control in the Independence Movement of 1919.

Mary Scranton was an American missionary to Korea, the first missionary sent there by the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS) of the Methodist Episcopal Church. During her more than two decades of service, Scranton laid the foundations for the WFMS mission in Seoul and helped to establish the wider Protestant missionary endeavor on the Korean peninsula. Her pioneering evangelistic and educational work, including the opening of Korea’s first modern school for girls, reflected Scranton’s commitment to ministering to and with Korean women.

After Josephine Beckwith and DeLaris Johnson broke the color barrier at two southern missionary training schools in the 1940s and 50s, their religious vocations led them and other African American women on a trajectory of missionary service resonate with what we recognize today as civil rights activism. While histories of African American women's mission organizing and those of their civil rights organizing typically are framed as separate endeavors, this article teases out the previously unexamined overlaps and connections between black women's missionary efforts and civil rights activism in the 1940s and 50s. In doing so, it bridges a disjuncture in African American women's religious history, illuminating the ways beliefs about Christian mission shaped the community work of black missionary women so that narratives of civil rights organizing and Christian missions are no longer discrete categories but are seen in historical continuity. In shedding light on the ways mission organizing and service served as a site for cultivating leadership and engaging segregation and racism, a new vision and practice of mission for the civil rights era is revealed and our understandings of the religious lives and activism of African American women are greatly enriched and expanded.

Mission work in the 19th century was one of the rare opportunities that gave women the possibility to respond to God’s call. The archive of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia (ELCL) was destroyed in 1944, and its collection have been lost. Many missionary letters are in archives in Germany. However, evidence of the mission work of the first women has been preserved in printed sources published in the territory of Latvia. The article aims to review the printed sources in the territory of Latvia as evidence of the work of the first Latvian women missionaries, especially the work of Hildegard Prozell (1898–1909), Auguste Weetneek (1899–1910) and Anna Irbe (1924–1940), about whom there are significant testimonies both in Latvian and German languages – Rigasches Kirchenblatt, Misions-Flugblatt, Jaunākās Ziņas, Ārmisija and other sources. The National Library of Latvia, the ELCL library, and the Estonian Literary Museum in Tartu are the main repositories for the sources used for this paper. The article analyses the content of these sources and the evidence of whether and how this missionary work left an impression on the society in the homeland. The first printed sources on the territory of Latvia about mission work in the 19th century are examined to provide the historical context. The study concludes that there is an expansive amount of information about Prozell, the first missionary from the territory of Latvia, and Irbe, the first ELCL missionary. They describe their service and trips to mission places, nature, geography, folk customs, etc. Also, these sources testify to the increase in support for mission work in the homeland. Missionaries who could be considered a minority, for example, Latvian women who went to serve through an unpopular mission society in Latvia, received much less or almost no attention from the printed press. This research enables discovering and preserving information about these women’s experiences at mission work, journeys, descriptions of nature and geography, folk customs and other important aspects. It not only contributes to and promotes understanding of the role of women in the mission work of the Latvian Church but also broadens the understanding of how this work affected society at home. Thus, this important cultural aspect is preserved and respected by researching and documenting periodical sources, supplementing and enriching Latvia’s national heritage.

English missionaries with the Church Missionary Society (CMS) began their work in Persia in 1869. In 1891 the CMS sent Mary Bird to Persia to evangelize Muslim women. In this article I consider Bird’s activities among Muslim women of Isfahan. Her work included establishing dispensaries and offering medical services to women and children. During the first phase of her time in Persia (1891–97), a small number of Muslim women and girls converted to Christianity.

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

This article examines the impact on American furniture and clothing styles by women missionaries traveling to Turkey in the Victorian era. Although there has been much discussion of the impact of Western missionaries on Turkey and other parts of Asia, the reciprocal impact on American culture has not been adequately assessed. Missionary work, which started in the 1820s in a modest manner, turned into a systematic and large-scale activity, reaching its climax during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Unlike Western diplomats, whose visits took place in the palaces of Istanbul, far from the realities of everyday life, missionary women had informal contact with ordinary Turkish women. Ottoman Turkish domestic space was highly gendered, so only these missionary women would have had access to authentic Ottoman Turkish interiors and been able to observe them as social spaces. The furniture style and the unique concept of comfort that they observed in Turkey presented an alternative point of view of home life and its organization. After spending years abroad, these women would return to the US to recruit and raise money for their missions by traveling from community to community, often creating interest for their work abroad by presenting examples of material culture. This article will put letters, diaries, travelogues and other contemporary material in the context of American culture of the Victorian era in order to chart the unusual way in which American and Turkish women interacted with each other at this historical moment.