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Gender, Culture and ‘the Spiritual Empire’: the Irish Protestant female missionary experience

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09612020601048803

1747-583X

Myrtle Hill,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Abstract Focusing on the archives of Irish Protestant missionary societies, this article aims to contribute to the growing feminist literature on a female missionary subculture which provided unique opportunities for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stressing diversity of experience and highlighting some of the most relevant features of the ‘sending’ culture, consideration is given to the notion and meaning of individual empowerment in a context where spiritual and secular motivations were inextricably interwoven and where ideological tensions between researcher and researched pose problems of both representation and interpretation. Some preliminary thoughts are also offered on the complexities and ambiguities of the imperial context when emerging nationalist movements were impacting on both the ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ cultures. Notes [1] See, for example, Pat Barr (1972) To China with Love (London: Secker & Warburg); Ruth Compton Brouwer (1990) New Women for God: Canadian Presbyterian women and Indian missions, 1876–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press); Fiona Bowie, Deborah Kirkwood & Shirley Ardener (Eds) (1993) Women and Missions Past and Present: anthropological and historical perceptions (Oxford: Berg); L. Flemming (Ed.) (1989) Women’s Work for Women: missionaries and social change in Asia (Boulder: Westview Press); Rosemary R. Gagan (1992) A Sensitive Independence: Canadian Methodist women missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881–1925 (Montreal: McGill‐Queen’s University Press); Patricia R. Hill (1985) The World and the Household: the American women’s foreign mission movement and cultural transformation, 1870–1920 (Michigan: University of Michigan Press); Jane Hunter (1984) The Gospel of Gentility: American women missionaries in turn‐of‐the‐century China (New Haven: Yale University Press); Maina Chawla Singh (2000) Gender, Religion and Power in Heathen Lands: North American women in South Asia 1860s–1940s (New York and London: Garland). [2] Janet Lee (1996) Between Subordination and She‐Tiger: social constructions of white femininity in the lives of single, Protestant missionaries in China, 1905–1930, Women’s Studies International Forum, 19(6), pp. 621–632, p. 624. [3] The pages of Women’s Work, the magazine of the Presbyterian Female Association, and the annual reports of all the missionary organisations are full of examples of hardship, illness and the deaths of infants of missionary families. [4] See, for example, Patrick J. Corish (Ed.) (1967) A History of Irish Catholicism, Vol. 6 (Dublin: Gill); Edmund M. Hogan (1990) The Irish Missionary Movement: a historical survey 1830–1980 (Catholic University of America Press); Bernard T. Smyth (1994) The Chinese Batch: the Maynooth Mission to China 1911–1920 (Dublin: Four Courts Press). [5] Annual Reports of the Female Association for Promoting Christianity among the Women of the East, held in the offices of the Presbyterian Women’s Association, Church House, Belfast; Annual Reports and Papers of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, Hibernian Branch, Ms. 317, Representative Church Body Library, Dublin; Dublin University Mission to Chota Nagpur, Annual Reports (1894–1984), Representative Church Body Library, Dublin; Papers of Amy Carmichael, D/4061, Public Record of Northern Ireland, Belfast (PRONI). [6] This statistical information has been calculated from a range of annual reports and other sources, including, F. E. Bland (1935) How the Church Missionary Society came to Ireland (Dublin: Church of Ireland Printing and Publishing Co.); Jack Hodgins (1994) Sister Island: a history of the Church Missionary Society in Ireland 1814–1994 (Belfast: CMS Ireland); Jack Thompson (Ed.) (1990) Into all the World: a history of 150 years of the overseas work of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (Belfast: Overseas Board of the Presbyterian Church). [7] R. H. Boyd (1953) The Prevailing Word (Belfast: The Foreign Mission Office), pp. 148–149. [8] Manchurian Missionaries, Florence McCaul (nee Crawford), typescript PRONI, D/1893/20, p. 6. [9] William Palmer Addley (1994) A Study of the Birth and Development of the Overseas Mission of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland up to 1910 (unpublished PhD thesis, Queen’s University Belfast). [10] Annual Report of the Female Association 1875. [11] Frank Houghton (1993) Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur: the story of a lover and her beloved (London: Christian Literature Crusade); Manchurian Missionaries, Florence McCaul (nee Crawford), PRONI, D/1893/20. [12] N. W. Taggart (1986) The Irish in World Methodism (London: Epworth). [13] Ibid., and Hodgins, Sister Island. [14] See, for example, Gillian McClelland (2000) Evangelical Philanthropy and Social Control or Emancipatory Feminism? A Case Study of Fisherwick Presbyterian Working Women’s Association, 1870–1918 (unpublished PhD thesis, Queen’s University Belfast). [15] Anne V. O’Connor & Susan M. Parkes (1996) Gladly Learn and Gladly Teach: a history of Alexandra College and School, Dublin, 1866–1966 (Dublin: Blackwater). [16] Hodgins, Sister Island, p. 151. [17] Alison Jordan (n.d.) Margaret Byers (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies), pp. 49–50; Andrea Brozyna (1999) Love, Labour and Prayer: female piety in Ulster evangelical temperance literature, 1863–1914 (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies). [18] McClelland, Evangelical Philanthropy and Social Control, p. 253. [19] For an overview of these developments, see David Hempton & Myrtle Hill (1992) Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740–1890 (London: Routledge). [20] Myrtle Hill (1996) Assessing the Awakening: the 1859 revival in Ulster, in Ingmar Brohed (Ed.) Church and People in Britain and Scandinavia (Lund and Bromley: Lund University Press), pp. 197–213. [21] Ibid.; see also, Janice Holmes (1995) The World Turned Upside Down: women in the Ulster revival of 1859, in Janice Holmes & Diane Urquhart (Eds) Coming into the Light: the work, politics and religion of women in Ulster 1840–1940 (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies), pp. 125–153. [22] Linda Wilson (2000) Constrained by Zeal: female spirituality amongst Nonconformists, 1825–1875 (Carlisle: Paternoster Biblical and Theological Monographs), p. 210. [23] Judith Rowbotham (2002) Ministering Angels, Not Ministers: women’s involvement in the foreign missionary movement, c.1860–1910, in Sue Morgan (Ed.), Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750–1900 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 179–196, p. 183. [24] Mrs E. R. Pitman (n.d.) Dr. Mary McGeorge, in Missionary Heroines in Eastern Lands (London: S. W. Partridge & Co.), pp. 76–127; James E. McWhirter (n.d.) Margaret E. McNeill: medical missionary to China 1899–1927 (Belfast: Women’s Association for Foreign Missions, Presbyterian Church in Ireland); Florence McCaul, PRONI, D1893/20; various issues of Women’s Work. [25] Presbyterian Churchman (1886). [26] Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry (1886) Respecting the Origins and Circumstances of the Riots in Belfast… 1886, Appendix D, p. 587. [27] Gladstone’s ‘conversion’ to the principle of home rule for Ireland in 1886 brought it into the realm of practical politics. [28] Maria Luddy (1995) Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth‐Century Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 63. [29] Report of the Female Association, 1879. [30] Singh, Gender, Religion and Heathen Lands, p. 9. [31] By 1911 56% of Irishwomen aged between twenty‐five and thirty‐four were single, compared to 36% in England and Wales, while in 1901, emigration attracted 100 females to every 82 males. For more on the secular status of Irishwomen in the early twentieth century, see Myrtle Hill (2003) A Century of Change (Belfast: Blackstaff). [32] Women’s Work, 1894. [33] Missionary Herald, 2 February 1914, p. 44. [34] The Medical Times and Gazette, 1 (London, 31 March, 1877). [35] Hodgins, Sister Island, p. 116 and Women’s Work, 1894, p. 314. [36] Rev. F. W. S. O’Neill (1918) Dr. Isabel Mitchell of Manchuria (London: James Clark); Obituary of Dr Margaret McNeill, The Fisherwick Messenger, Belfast, 1944. [37] A. M. Wood (n.d.) Woman’s Call to Woman, Methodist Missionary Society Archives, G532, p. 1. Methodist Missionary Society Library, London. [38] Salaries for female missionaries were on par with those for well‐experienced first‐grade female National School teachers, considerably higher than the wages of a male skilled worker. See John Lynch A Tale of Three Cities: Belfast, Bristol and Bath (unpublished PhD thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, 1996, appendix 2). [39] Report of the Female Association, 1906. [40] O’Neill, Dr. Isabel Mitchell. [41] Pitman, Dr. Mary McGeorge. [42] Women’s Work (November 1877). [43] PRONI, Dohnavur Letter, September 1925, D4061/30/1. [44] Women’s Work (January 1914). [45] Jane Haggis (1998) ‘A heart that has felt the love of God and longs for others to know it’: conventions of gender, tensions of self and constructions of difference in offering to be a lady missionary, in Women’s History Review, 7(2), pp. 171–193. [46] Women’s Work (October 1911). [47] Brouwer, New Women for God, p. 90. [48] Haggis, ‘A heart that has felt the love of God’, p. 172. [49] Jane Haggis (1998) White Women and Colonialism: towards a non‐recuperative history, in Clare Midgley (Ed.) Gender and Imperialism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press), pp. 45–75, p. 53. [50] World Missionary Conference (1910) Vol. V, Preparation of Missionaries (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier), pp. 153–154. [51] Singh, Gender, Religion and Heathen Lands, p. 40. [52] Ruth Compton Brouwer (2003) Modernizing Women, Modernizing Men: the changing missions of three professional women in Asia and Africa (University of British Columbia Press), p. 32. [53] Houghton, Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur; Elisabeth Elliot (1987) A Chance to Die: the life and legacy of Amy Carmichael (Carlisle: OM Publishing); Amy Carmichael’s papers are held in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, D4061. [54] Eric J. Sharpe (1996) The Legacy of Amy Carmichael, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 20(3), pp. 121–124, p. 122. [55] Catherine Hall (1992) White, Male and Middle Class: explorations in feminism and history (Cambridge: Polity Press); see also Tony D. Triggs (Ed.) (1995) The Book of Margery Kempe: the autobiography of the Wild Woman of God (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates); Sandra J. McEntire (1992) Margery Kempe: a book of essays (London and New York: Garland). [56] Houghton, Amy Carmichael, p. 45. [57] The settlement at Dohnavur focused its attention on girls, and from 1918, boys, who were perceived to be vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Carmichael aimed to provide such children with a Christian home, education and training. [58] Amy Carmichael (1932) Gold Cord: the story of a fellowship (London: SPCK 1938 edition), p. 10. [59] Ibid., p. 9. [60] Sharpe, ‘The Legacy of Amy Carmichael’, pp. 121–124. [61] Quoted in Elliot, A Chance to Die, p. 29. [62] Gaius Davies (2001) Genius, Grief and Grace (London: Christian Focus Publications), p. 256. [63] B. Trehane (1987) Amy Carmichael: fragments that remain (London: SPCK), pp. 35–40. [64] Peter Williams (1993), The Missing Link: the recruitment of women missionaries in some English evangelical missionary societies in the nineteenth century, in Bowie et al. (Eds), Women and Missions, pp. 43–69, p. 66; Bowie (1993) Introduction: reclaiming women’s presence, in Bowie et al. (Eds), Women and Missions, pp. 1–19, p. 10. [65] Williams, ‘The Missing Link’, p. 50. [66] In 1925 Carmichael dropped the always‐tenuous connection between Dohnavur and the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, and two years later established the Dohnavur Fellowship as an independent legal body. [67] J. H. Cousins & M. E. Cousins (1950) We Two Together (Madras: Ganesh). [68] The Bombay Guardian (15 October 1910) p. 10. [69] The Fisherwick Messenger, June 1944. [70] Annual Report of the Female Association, 1892. [71] Diary of Elizabeth Jane McCauley, late of Clough, County Down, Library of the Presbyterian Historical Society, Church House, Belfast. [72] Quoted in Houghton, Amy Carmichael, p. 49. [73] Phyllis Mack (2003) Religion, Feminism and the Problem of Agency: reflections of eighteenth‐century Quakerism, Signs, 29(1), pp. 149–78. [74] Ibid., p. 5. [75] Letter to Grace Goodrich, 28 November 1909, quoted in Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility, p. 53; See also, Leslie J. Francis (1997) The Psychology of Gender Differences in Religion: a review of empirical research, Religion, 27, pp. 81–96. [76] Hitherto (n.d.). [77] J. Cox (1994) Audience and Exclusion at the Margins of Imperial History, Women’s History Review, 3(4), pp. 501–514. [78] Jane Hunter notes that ‘the majority of missionary women were at least semi‐professional writers…’, Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility, p. 60; see also Hogan, The Irish Missionary Movement; Judith Rowbotham (1998) ‘Hear an Indian Sister’s Plea’: reporting the work of 19th‐century female missionaries’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 21(3), pp. 247–261. [79] Rowbotham ‘Hear an Indian Sister’s Plea’, p. 255. [80] Hodgins, Sister Island, p. 146. [81] Women’s Work (June 1892). [82] Singh, Gender, Religion and ‘Heathen Lands’, p. 22. [83] Annie Woods (n.d.) A Corner of Cathay, MMSA, MMS Library, G533, p. 9. [84] Report of the Female Association, 1889. [85] Missionary Herald (2 February 1914) p. 43; Report of the Female Association, 1881. [86] Report of the Female Association, 1888. [87] Barbara N. Ramusack (1992) Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British women activists in India, 1865–1945, in Nupur Chaudhuri & Margaret Strobel (Ed.) Western Women and Imperialism: complicity and resistance (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), pp. 119–36, p. 133. [88] Elliot, A Chance to Die, p. 180; Houghton, Amy Carmichael, p. 220; Quoted in Trehane, Fragments that Remain, p. 160. [89] Sarah Paul (1954) In the Land of My Dreams (Belfast: The Foreign Mission Office). [90] Report of the Female Association, 1875. [91] Haggis, ‘White Women and Colonialism’. [92] Ibid. p. 70; C. H. Mohanty (1984) Under Western Eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses, Boundary, 2, pp. 333–358; Chaudhuri & Strobel (Eds), Western Women and Imperialism; Alison M. Jaggar (1998) Globalizing Feminist Ethics, Hypatia, 13(2), pp. 1–24. [93] Women’s Work (1907) p. 107. [94] Women’s Work (July 1911). [95] Andrew Porter (1997) ‘Cultural Imperialism’ and Protestant Missionary Enterprise 1780–1914, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 25(3), pp. 367–391, p. 377. [96] Report of the Female Association, 1931. [97] Copies of all first editions of Carmichael books can be found in PRONI, D14061. [98] Report of the Female Association, 1897; Irish Presbyterian Mission Hospital, Kirin, Manchuria, 1896–1936, PRONI D/2332/2, p. 1. [99] Typescript Florence McCaul, PRONI D/1893/20, p. 4. [100] Women’s Work (October 1907). [101] Hodgins, Sister Island, p. 145. [102] Sr. M. Rita Rozario (1988) Trafficking in Women and Children in India: sexual exploitation and sale (New Delhi: Uppal Pub. House), pp. 54–55. [103] Kay K. Jordan (2003) From Sacred Servant to Profane Prostitute: a history of the changing legal status of the Devadasis in India, 1857–1947 (New Delhi: Manohar). [104] Dina M. Siddiqi (forthcoming) Global Feminism and the Imperialism of the Universal, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (Humanities). Special Millennium issue on Transformations in Knowledge in Asia. [105] Margaret Wilkinson (1996) At BBC Corner I Remember Amy Carmichael (Coleraine: Impact Printing). [106] Leslie A. Flemming, A New Humanity: American women missionaries’ ideals for women in North India, 1870–1930, in Chaudhuri & Strobel, Western Women and Imperialism, pp. 191–206, p. 202. [107] Annual Report, 1939, Minutes, Accounts, Correspondence and Miscellaneous Records of the Dublin University Mission to Chota Nagpur, India, 1891–1969, Representative Church Body Library, Dublin. [108] Wilkinson, At BBC Corner, p. 70. [109] Singh, Gender, Religion and ‘Heathen Lands’; I am grateful to Maina Singh for her enthusiasm and generosity in discussions of these issues. [110] C. H. Moharty (2003) ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: feminist solidarity through anticapitalist struggles, Signs, 28(2), pp. 1–26, p. 4. [111] Lee, ‘Between Subordination and She‐Tiger’, p. 624. [112] Brouwer, Modern Women, Modernizing Men, p. 35. Additional informationNotes on contributorsMyrtle Hill Myrtle Hill is currently Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast. A senior lecturer in social, religious and women’s history, she has published many articles and chapters in these areas. Her books include Women in Ireland: a century of change (Belfast, 2003) and The Time of the End: millenarian beliefs in Ulster (Belfast, 2001).