Competing Kingdoms

by Reeves-ellington, Barbara; Sklar, Kathryn Kish; Shemo, Connie A.

• ISBN13: 9780822346500
• ISBN10: 0822346508
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-02-26
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

Competing Kingdomsrethinks 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. Focusing on women from several denominations, their essays 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 who were constructed as foreign within the United States, 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.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Re-Visioning American Women in the World
Women's Mission in Historical Perspective American Identity and Christian Internationalism	p. 19
Woman, Missions, and Empire New Approaches to American Cultural Expansion	p. 43
Women
Canonizing Harriet Newell Women, the Evangelical Press, and the Foreign Mission Movement in New England, 1800-1840	p. 69
An Unwomanly Woman and Her Sons in Christ Faith, Empire, and Gender in Colonial Rhodesia, 1899-1906	p. 94
"So Thoroughly American" Gertrude Howe, Kang Cheng, and Cultural Imperialism in the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society, 1872-1931	p. 117
From Redeemers to Partners American Women Missionaries and the "Woman Question" in India, 1919-1939	p. 141
Mission
Settler Colonists, "Christian Citizenship," and the Women's Missionary Federation at the Bethany Indian Mission in Wittenberg, Wisconsin, 1884-1934	p. 167
New Life, New Faith, New Nation, New Women Competing Models at the Door of Hope Mission in Shanghai	p. 195
"No Nation Can Rise Higher than Its Women" The Women's Ecumenical Missionary Movement and Tokyo Woman's Christian College	p. 218
Nile Mother Lillian Trasher and the Orphans of Egypt	p. 240
Nation
Embracing Domesticity Women, Mission, and Nation Building in Ottoman Europe, 1832-1872	p. 269
Imperial Encounters at Home Women, Empire, and the Home Mission Project in Late Nineteenth-Century America	p. 293
Three African American Women Missionaries in the Congo, 1887-1899 The Confluence of Race, Culture, Identity, and Nationality	p. 318
"Stepmother America" The Woman's Board of Missions in the Philippines, 1902-1930	p. 342
Conclusion Doing Everything Religion, Race, and Empire in the U.S. Protestant Women's Missionary Enterprise, 1812-1960	p. 367
Selected Bibliography	p. 391
Contributors	p. 397
Index	p. 401
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