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Header image: Ida Pruitt, "Missionaries' Children: A Help of a Hindrance?" (1910) (Radcliffe Collection). Explored below.
Women missionaries walked a narrow line between independence and restriction. Single and married women missionaries experienced perhaps more freedom than their counterparts in the United States by leading ministries and directing the course of their daily lives. But this freedom was largely based on assumptions that their white race made them inherently better than the people to which they evangelized.
The fundraising mailing to the right is an example of how missionary couples were often portrayed in the twentieth century--as teams, partners--even if that implied equity was not the lived experience of the women missionaries.
Find sources on this page that explore how women missionaries negotiated gender and family life, and how women missionaries projected their ideas about gender onto the women they met abroad.
"Our Partners in Mission," 1980 (Presbyterian Historical Society)
Secondary Sources: Gender Theory and Women's History
Secondary Sources: Gender Theory and Women's History
Books
Books
The books below examine women missionaries and the women they missioned to using gender theory and contextualize their subjects in the broader themes of women's history.
Click the images or links below to access the resources.
Frances S. Adeney, Women and Christian Mission: Ways of Knowing and Doing Theology (2015).
Karen K. Seat, "Providence has Freed Our Hands": Women's Movement and the American Encounter with Japan (2008).
Ruth Compton Brouwer, Modern Women Modernizing Men, (2002).
Maina Chawla Singh, Gender, Religion, and 'Heathen Lands' (2000).
Mary Taylor Huber, and Nancy C. Lutkehaus (ed.), Gendered Missions (1999).
Gael Graham, Gender, Culture, and Christianity (1995).
Fiona Bowie, Deborah Kirkwood, and Shirley Ardener (ed.) Women and Missions: Past and Present Anthropological and Historical Perceptions (1993).
Virginia Anne Muller, Nancy Cochran: A Missionary-Educator in Early Twentieth-Century China (dissertation, 1978).
Articles
Articles
Dana L. Robert, "World Christianity as a Women's Movement," in International Bulletin of Missionary Research 30, no. 4 (October 2006).
Pernet, Corrine A. "Chilean Feminists, the International Women's Movement, and Suffrage, 1915-1950," Pacific Historical Review, 2000.
Dana L. Robert, "Global Friendship as Incarnational Missional Practice," in International Bulletin of Missionary Research 39, no. 4 (October 2015).
Secondary Sources: Women as Wives, Mothers, and Missionaries
Secondary Sources: Women as Wives, Mothers, and Missionaries
Books
Books
The books below ask questions about how women missionaries related to their kinship formation--especially with their husbands, children, or how their singleness affected their missions.
Hillary Kaell, Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States, (2020).
P. Lorraine Coops, Living by Faith: Maritime Baptist Single Women Missionaries in India, 1880-1930, (dissertation, 1996).
Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (1996).
Marjorie King, Missionary Mother and Radical Daughter: Anna and Ida Pruitt in China, 1887-1939 (disseration, 1984).
Articles
Articles
Kaell's book (above) discusses kinship and shows how women negotiate their relationships with international missions from home in the twenty-first century. The following articles also explore constructions of kinship among women missionaries more specifically.
Kay Whitehead, "Single Women Teachers as Missionaries and Women Education Officers in mid-twentieth century British Africa," Women's History Review 30, no.3 (2021).
Kathryn T. Long, "'In the Modern World but Not Of It': The 'Aucua Martyrs', Evangelicalism, and Postwar American Culture" in The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home, ed. Daniel H. Bays (2010).
Andrea Arrington, "Making Sense of Martha: Single Women and Mission Work," Social Sciences and Missions 23, no. 2 (2010).
Primary Sources
Primary Sources
Books
Books
Click the arrows on the book covers to learn more about the books.
A Crusade of Compassion for the Study of Nations: a Study of Medical Missions for Women and Children (1919).
Margaret Ross Miller, Women Under the Southern Cross (1935).
Elisabeth Elliot, The Savage: My Kinsman (1956)
Elisabeth Elliot, Through Gates of Splendor (1957)
Dorothy Vander Kaay, Women's World: Handbook of Ideas and Procedures for Ladies Groups (1974)
Dorothy Vander Kaay's 1989 manual for women's mission groups reveals how professionalized women's missionary circles were in the 20th century. This professionalization and intense organization of these groups (see especially the instructive skit printed at the end of the book for how not to conduct a meeting--including how to report from committees and elect officers) is part of the broader anxiety around the post-industrial economy of the 1980s. How did women fit into this new office culture? How did women's work look? What does the professionalization of volunteer work tell us about feminism at the end of the 1980s?
R. Pierce Beaver, American Protestant Women in World Mission: A History of the First Feminist Movement in North America (1980).
The original edition was published in 1968, and Beaver argues that women as international missions represent the original feminists. While his understanding of feminism is limited by certain ideas about respectability, this account details how women missionaries gained a certain level of complicated equality within their churches. How does thinking about Protestant women missionaries as the first feminists require us to rethink feminism? What does it mean for our understanding of gender in the United States in the late-19th and early-20th centuries?
Ida Pruitt, "Missionaries' Children: A Help of a Hindrance?" (1910) (Radcliffe Collection).
Manuscript Primary Sources
Manuscript Primary Sources
This text, written by missionary Ida Pruitt in 1910, reflects on the benefits and drawbacks of missionaries with children. Many primary sources, like this one, exist in manuscript archival collections which are usually sorted into categories like "correspondence," "diaries," and "writings." Manuscript writings like these are valuable sources because they might reveal more of the private thoughts of missionary women, more than their published works. Manuscript primary sources like these are also useful in helping us understand the relationships women missionaries had--with their husbands, their churches, and with each other. Unlike books and images which often portray mission activity--and world Christianity--as a triumphant, if hard, process, primary sources like this text featured to the left (and novels--see below) reveal the anxieties women missionaries carried with them.
Why would Pruitt write on this topic? What was her relationship like with her own children?
How did missionary children respond to their childhoods when they grew up?
Were churches supportive of missionary families?
See more manuscript primary sources here.
Novels as Primary Sources
Novels as Primary Sources
Novels can also be read as primary sources, and can tell us about how the author understands women missionaries. According to Jamie S. Scott, depictions of missionaries in literature underwent a significant shift in the mid-twentieth century. Whereas before the second world war, women missionaries in novels were triumphant and righteous heroines, in the latter half of the twentieth century, missionary novels were often more critical than sympathetic. As with analyzing any primary source, it is helpful to understand the background of the author to grasp the position of their work. Barbara Kingsolver's 1998 book The Poisonwood Bible, for example, is a portrait of a bumbling, racist Baptist missionary in the 1950s Congo, narrated by his wife and four daughters. Kingsolver herself was the child of missionaries. How would her own experience direct the characterizations in her novel?
Click through the slides to the left for a list of missionary novels centered on or written by women from 1856 to 1998 and click on the covers to access .the books.
How are women missionaries depicted in this story? Are they heroines or villains?
How are ideas about gender represented? Are the women missionaries depicted single, married, or part of a romantic subplot?
How are ideas about gender showing up in depictions of other characters in the book?
Check out these secondary sources that explore missionaries in fiction:
Jamie S. Scott, "Missions in Fiction," International Bulletin of Missionary Research 32, no. 3 (July 2008).
Jackie Thomas, "Reverend Samuel: The Missionary Minister in "The Color Purple," Griot, 16, no. 2 (Fall 1997).
Vanessa Kunnemann, Middlebrow Mission: Pearl S. Buck's American China (2015).
Leanne Ulvang, "Return to the Good Earth," Publishers Weekly 257, no. 17 (April 2010).
Soojin Chung, "The Missiology of Pearl Sydenstricker Buck," International Bulletin of Mission Research 41, no. 2 (April 2017).
Peter J. Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (1996).
Croisy, Sophie. "Re-visioning Southern Identity: Transatlantic Cultural Collisions in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible," Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 10, no. 3 (2012).
Nathan Kilpatrick, "Singing a New Song from the Conqueror's Music: Religious Hybridity in The Poisonwood Bible," Religion and Literature, 43, no. 3 (2011).
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