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- Title
Motherhood on a Mission: Missionaries, "Heathens," and the Maternal Ideal in the Early American Republic.
- Authors
BERMAN, CASSANDRA N.
- Abstract
This essay examines motherhood in the context of the United States' first foreign missionary movement. In the early nineteenth century, as the first generation of missionaries departed for foreign locations--including India, Burma, and the Sandwich Islands--concern began to mount over the behavior of foreign mothers who were neither white nor Christian. In popular texts, such women were frequently depicted as harmful mothers who abused, neglected, or killed their own children, and their conversion to Christianity was touted as the only path toward their reformation. This trope of the purportedly harmful, "heathen" mother served as powerful motivation for American women who hoped to evangelize overseas by marrying missionaries. In joining missions, they planned to convert foreign women, transform family and gender relations, and protect supposedly vulnerable children. Yet as their own writing frequently revealed, missionary wives themselves largely failed to conform to the rigorous strictures of early republican maternity. Using the edited and published memoirs of missionary wives as a lens, I argue that maternity served a far more complex role in American public life than has previously been acknowledged.
- Subjects
UNITED States; AMERICAN Christian missions; MOTHERHOOD; WOMEN missionaries; AMERICANS in foreign countries; NINETEENTH century; MOTHERS in literature; POPULAR culture; EVANGELISTIC work -- History; WOMEN'S writings; HISTORY of popular culture
- Publication
Early American Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2019, Vol 17, Issue 4, p474
- ISSN
1543-4273
- Publication type
Article