Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960(American Encounters/Global Interactions)

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

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments xi Introduction / Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie Schemo 1 I. Re-visioning American Women in the World Women's Mission in Historical Perspective: American Identity and Christian Internationalism / Jane H. Hunter 19 Woman, Missions, and Empire: New Approaches to American Cultural Expansion / Ian Tyrrell 43 II. Women Canonizing Harriet Newell: Women, the Evangelical Press, and the Foreign Mission Movement in New England, 1800–1840 / Mary Kupiec Cayton 69 An Unwomanly Woman and Her Sons in Christ: Faith, Empire, and Gender in Colonial Rhodesia, 1899–1906 / Wendy Urban-Mead 94 "So Thoroughly American": Gertrude Howe, Kang Cheng, and Cultural Imperialism in the Women's Foreign Missionary Society, 1872–1931 / Connie Shemo 117 From Redeemers to Partners: American Women Missionaries and the "Woman Question" in India 1919–1939 / Susan Haskell Khan 141 III. Mission Settler Colonists, "Christian Citizenship," and the Women's Missionary Federation at the Bethany Indian Mission in Wittenberg, Wisconsin, 1884–1934 / Betty Ann Bergland 167 New Life, New Faith, New Nation, New Women: Competing Models at the Door of Hope Mission in Shanghai / Sue Gronewold 195 "No Nation Can Rise Higher than Its Women": The Women's Ecumenical Missionary Movement and Tokyo Women's Christian College / Rui Kohiyama 218 Nile Mother: Lillian Thrasher and the Orphans of Egypt / Beth Baron 240 IV. Nation Embracing Domesticity: Women, Mission, and Nation Building in Ottoman Europe, 1832–1872 / Barbara Reeves-Ellington 269 Imperial Encounters at Home: Women, Empire, and the Home Mission Project in Late Nineteenth-Century America / Derek Chang 293 Three African American Women Missionaries in the Congo, 1887–1899: The Confluence of Race, Culture, Identity, and Nationality / Sylvia M. Jacobs 318 "Stepmother America": The Woman's Board of Missions in the Philippines, 1902–1930 / Laura R. Prieto 342 Conclusion. Doing Everything: Religion, Race, and Empire in the U.S. Protestant Women's Missionary Enterprise, 1812–1960 / Mary A. Renda 367 Selected Bibliography 391 Contributors 397 Index 401