Race and Empire

While missionary men usually centered their mission activity on preaching, women more often worked in education or medical care because of restrictions on female preaching. These efforts—even if they offered marginal public services—were contributing factors to American imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Women missionaries’ actions are inseparable from white supremacist ideas about the inferiority of non-Christians (and, in most cases, non-Protestants). As is true throughout white women’s history, their imperialist decisions were often made within tightly controlled patriarchal systems, revealing how experiences of inequality do not preclude women from perpetuating white supremacy.

The movie poster to the left advertises "The Nun's Story," a 1959 film starring Audrey Hepburn. The film follows the story of Sister Luke, a surgical nurse in the Belgian Congo in the 1930s. This film, when analyzed as a primary source, reveals important ideas about race and religion among women missionaries in the twentieth century.

Find sources on this page that explore how women missionaries constructed race and created an American empire.

Images

Images (including photographs and other media) often accompany manuscript collections. These images can give us a fuller understanding of text-based sources. For example, the portrait to the left is part of a collection of women medical missionaries from the early 20th century. The portrait collection includes only one portrait of a Black woman, and none of the women are named. This leads us to important questions about race and international missions in this period:

Why did Black women serve as missionaries? Were their motivations different from white women?

What kinds of discrimination did Black women face in this profession? Were the same kinds of funding sources open to them as were open to white women?

Reading sources against the grain is important when studying the history of race. It is also essential to pay attention to the absences in our sources. With this collection, portraits of Black women were missing. Black women missionaries are underrepresented across Harvard's collections. Those absences tell us important stories about what kinds of people had the resources to collect and preserve their papers and what kinds of stories Harvard sought to preserve.

These absences tell us important stories about World Christianity more generally, too. Do we misunderstand international missions as primarily a white endeavor because of neglected or unpreserved source material? This understanding is currently being revised by scholars of "reverse" missions who study how Asian and African Christians evangelize in the United States. There is a similar scholarly need for analyzing Black missionaries--in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and today.