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Competing Kingdoms
Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960
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Edited by:
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2010
About this book
Competing Kingdoms rethinks the importance of women and religion within U.S. imperial culture from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. In an era when the United States was emerging as a world power to challenge the hegemony of European imperial powers, American women missionaries strove to create a new Kingdom of God. They did much to shape a Protestant empire based on American values and institutions. This book examines American women’s activism in a broad transnational context. It offers a complex array of engagements with their efforts to provide rich intercultural histories about the global expansion of American culture and American Protestantism.
An international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, the contributors bring under-utilized evidence from U.S. and non-U.S. sources to bear on the study of American women missionaries abroad and at home. Focusing on women from several denominations, they build on the insights of postcolonial scholarship to incorporate the agency of the people among whom missionaries lived. They explore how people in China, the Congo Free State, Egypt, India, Japan, Ndebeleland (colonial Rhodesia), Ottoman Bulgaria, and the Philippines perceived, experienced, and negotiated American cultural expansion. They also consider missionary work among people within the United States who were constructed as foreign, including African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants. By presenting multiple cultural perspectives, this important collection challenges simplistic notions about missionary cultural imperialism, revealing the complexity of American missionary attitudes toward race and the ways that ideas of domesticity were reworked and appropriated in various settings. It expands the field of U.S. women’s history into the international arena, increases understanding of the global spread of American culture, and offers new concepts for analyzing the history of American empire.
Contributors: Beth Baron, Betty Bergland, Mary Kupiec Cayton, Derek Chang, Sue Gronewold, Jane Hunter, Sylvia Jacobs, Susan Haskell Khan, Rui Kohiyama, Laura Prieto, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Mary Renda, Connie A. Shemo, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Ian Tyrrell, Wendy Urban-Mead
Author / Editor information
Barbara Reeves-Ellington is Associate Professor of History at Siena College in Loudonville, New York.
Kathryn Kish Sklar is Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York, Binghamton.
Connie A. Shemo is Assistant Professor of History at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh.
Reviews
“In Competing Kingdoms, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo bring together a group of emerging and established historians in an innovative project of bringing insights from American mission women’s history into the framework of American cultural imperialism. . . . This collection offers fertile directions for scholars concerned with American imperialism and more generally with the thorny questions of gender, missions, and empires. We can look forward to many of these historians producing book-length accounts where they can develop their research findings more fully. The editors are to be congratulated.” - Patricia Grimshaw, Journal of Church and State
“Competing Kingdoms presents fresh and wide-ranging scholarship on gender and mission, linking it to American cultural expansionism (1812-1960).” - Maina Chawla Singh, International Bulletin of Missionary Research
“[A]n important and welcome collection of essays. . . . The attempt to connect gender and foreign relations succeeds thanks to the breadth of scholarship in this volume and the diverse but focused essays that comprise it. . . . [A] groundbreaking contribution to US history.” - Johanna Selles, Missiology
“Competing Kingdoms achieves through the inclusion of many authors what few have been able to achieve singly: the internationalization of American women’s history. It focuses on a group of culture agents who were at the avant-garde of America’s emergence into global influence: women missionaries.”—Ann Braude, author of Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion
“This rich, diverse collection of essays illuminates women’s pivotal role in the Protestant missions that were at the center of Americans’ interactions with Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in the nineteenth century and early twentieth. Throughout the pieces, readers witness the women that made missions possible—not only as missionaries, but also as sponsors and audiences—navigating the tensions and intersections between ideals and practices of spiritual equality and those of patriarchy, empire, and race, enlisting and challenging gendered conventions in the process. This volume will prove an indispensable guide in the effort to bring gender analysis, religious culture, and women’s agency into an internationalized historiography of the United States.”—Paul A. Kramer, author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines
“Competing Kingdoms reveals the complex and unpredictable results of the missionary enterprise, showing how the work of American women simultaneously constructed and destabilized gender, cultural, and racial hierarchies, with significant results for sending and receiving cultures alike. The tensions suggested in the volume’s title play out in fascinating detail in its pages.”
-- Andrew Witmer Journal of American History
“Competing Kingdoms presents fresh and wide-ranging scholarship on gender and mission, linking it to American cultural expansionism (1812–1960).”
-- Maina Chawla Singh International Bulletin of Missionary Research
“[A]n important and welcome collection of essays. . . . The attempt to connect gender and foreign relations succeeds thanks to the breadth of scholarship in this volume and the diverse but focused essays that comprise it. . . . [A] groundbreaking contribution to US history.”
-- Johanna Selles Missiology
“In Competing Kingdoms, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo bring together a group of emerging and established historians in an innovative project of bringing insights from American mission women’s history into the framework of American cultural imperialism. . . . This collection offers fertile directions for scholars concerned with American imperialism and more generally with the thorny questions of gender, missions, and empires. We can look forward to many of these historians producing book-length accounts where they can develop their research findings more fully. The editors are to be congratulated.”
-- Patricia Grimshaw Journal of Church and State
Topics
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Frontmatter
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Contents
vii -
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Acknowledgments
xi -
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Introduction
1 - I. re-visioning american women in the world
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Women’s Mission in Historical Perspective: American Identity and Christian Internationalism
19 -
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Woman, Missions, and Empire: New Approaches to American Cultural Expansion
43 - II. Women
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Canonizing Harriet Newell: Women, the Evangelical Press, and the Foreign Mission Movement in New England, 1800–1840
69 -
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An Unwomanly Woman and Her Sons in Christ: Faith, Empire, and Gender in Colonial Rhodesia, 1899–1906
94 -
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‘‘So Thoroughly American’’ Gertrude Howe, Kang Cheng, and Cultural Imperialism in the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, 1872–1931
117 -
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From Redeemers to Partners: American Women Missionaries and the ‘‘Woman Question’’ in India, 1919–1939
141 - III. Mission
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Settler Colonists, ‘‘Christian Citizenship,’’ and the Women’s Missionary Federation at the Bethany Indian Mission in Wittenberg, Wisconsin, 1884–1934
167 -
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New Life, New Faith, New Nation, New Women: Competing Models at the Door of Hope Mission in Shanghai
195 -
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‘‘No Nation Can Rise Higher than Its Women’’: The Women’s Ecumenical Missionary Movement and Tokyo Woman’s Christian College
218 -
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Nile Mother: Lillian Trasher and the Orphans of Egypt
240 - IV. Nation
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Embracing Domesticity: Women, Mission, and Nation Building in Ottoman Europe, 1832–1872
269 -
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Imperial Encounters at Home: Women, Empire, and the Home Mission Project in Late Nineteenth-Century America
293 -
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Three African American Women Missionaries in the Congo, 1887–1899: The Confluence of Race, Culture, Identity, and Nationality
318 -
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‘‘Stepmother America’’: The Woman’s Board of Missions in the Philippines, 1902–1930
342 -
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Conclusion. Doing Everything: Religion, Race, and Empire in the U.S. Protestant Women’s Missionary Enterprise, 1812–1960
367 -
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Selected Bibliography
391 -
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Contributors
397 -
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Index
401
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 14, 2020
eBook ISBN:
9780822392590
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
