Women Missionaries

The development of U.S. women's history in the 1970s, with proliferating interests in nineteenth century "woman's culture," inspired scholarly attention to the missionary movement from the perspective of women's history. This perspective opened way for a positive reassessment of the movement and led to Jane Hunter's The Gospel of Gentility (1984) on American women missionaries in China at the turn-of-the century and Patricia R. Hill's The World Their Housebold (1985) on missionary ideology. Both Hunter and Hill opened a new perspective on the study of a women's foreign missionary movement by applying notions of "woman's culture" and the public application of domestic ideals, analyses that had become well-developed in women's history.

Hunter linked missionary experience with the notion of cultural imperialism and argued that colonial inequalities in China , which provided "status" and "power" to foreigners residing in China , accorded American women missionaries the rewards of "freedom," "authority," "vocational competence," and "opportunities" equal to men at home. Thereby, Hunter poignantly observed that colonial authority provided a solution to a problem at home, by offering an opportunity of gender equality to the American women missionaries in China . Jane Hunter's book on American women missionaries in China recognized the advantages of mission work for U.S. women.

In addition to showing what the missionaries gained from their China experience, Jane Hunter discussed the recipient's culture and analyzed the meaning of Christian identity for Chinese women. Yet as she noted, the available sources were scarce, and she could only examine three Chinese women born in the 1890s who came from the genteel class and who were converted to Christianity. From these limited sources, Hunter drew the conclusion that mission institutions became "useful oases beyond the deserts of conventional familial expectation" for both the Chinese women and the American women missionaries.

Kohiyama Rui, in her 1992 book (published in Japanese) on Presbyterian women missionaries and the Dutch Reformed Church woman missionary, who founded girls' schools in Yokohoma, Tokyo and Hakodate between 1868 and 1889, also touched on this inter-cultural aspect in the final chapter. The author drew portraits of three Japanese women educated at the missionary schools.