CONCLUSIONES

In addition to providing an organizational network which served to cross, at least temporally, national, cultural, and racial borders, missionary work initially presented thousands of Protestant churchwomen with opportunities to evangelize non-Christian and non-Protestant peoples. Prior to the turn o f the twentieth century, even though their primary tasks focused on alleviating physical needs and educating those less fortunate, such activities were often understood as the means to an end; in other words, a hot meal, a new school, or an opportunity for employment provided a road to conversion.

Missionary women’s actions were guided by the belief that “Christian conversion could promote social betterment as well as spiritual salvation.”44 Churchwomen therefore busied themselves with not only evangelism at home and abroad, but also with improving the conditions in which people lived, especially women and children.

43Beaver, 158; Mabel Head, Forward Together: An Historical Sketch o f

Interdenominational Women's Work and The United Council o f Church Women, (NYC: United Council o f Church Women, 1945), 4; Katherine Bennett, Miss Florence G. Tyler, Mrs. E.H. Goedeke, “All That Is Past Is P r o lo g u e T h e Emergence o f

Interdenominational Organizations Among Protestant Women, (NYC: United Council o f Church Women, 1944), 17.

After World War I, however, the basic philosophy o f missionary work, which regarded all people as sons and daughters o f God, began to take a greater hold in

significant ways. This underlying foundation grew in influence when missionary women, in response to the war’s horrors, reevaluated their relationships with their missionary prospects at home and over seas and found the relationships to be especially lacking in mutuality. This reevaluation, coupled with regular resistance on the part o f the prospects, inspired a new attitude to develop among missionary women that regarded all people, despite their country o f origin or skin color, as members o f one race. As it did so, the organizational and theoretical divisions churchwomen had established to separate foreign and home missions began to dissipate, allowing for missionary work to engender a race relations initiative at home. Years later, when the United Council o f Church Women organized in 1941, white women who had been active in the missions agreed on

interracialism as a priority. This suggested that a common missiology influenced white members' racial attitudes. For those that understood and agreed upon the imperative to unite across racial lines, it did not matter whether they had been involved in foreign or home missions or both. What did matter was that a shift in thinking transpired among missionary women after World War I, paving the way for race relations to develop as a missionary activity.

Foreign Missions

The foreign missionary enterprise represented one aspect o f the United States’ unique brand o f cultural imperialism in places such as China, Africa and India. The absence o f an American political or governmental body in these places, however, did not signify an

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absence o f imperial power. Indeed, the Christian assumption o f the right to conquer the world or remake it in Western Christian terms was a significant element in this imperial formula. Such a formula included defining not only what Christianity expected but also what civilization entailed. Women missionaries participated in this imperialist endeavor, especially as architects of “civilizing” institutions such as schools, hospitals and social welfare agencies. Such institutions represented to evangelical Protestants the hope for future conversions as well as successful attempts to fundamentally change foreign cultures. In fact, when national missionary leaders spoke to the success o f missions, they often highlighted the proliferation o f colleges and universities, schools and medical facilities rather than the numbers o f churches and converts. Women’s work in the

mission fields thus often represented a “cultural assault.” The institutions women erected or assisted male missionaries in building, a male missionary leader wrote, “abolished cannibalism and human sacrifice and cruelty, organized famine relief, improved

husbandry and agriculture, introduced Western medicines and medical science, founded leper asylums and colonies, promoted cleanliness and sanitation, and checked war.”45 It would take world war, consistent resistance on the part o f their intended converts, a

45Robert E. Speer, Missionary Principles and Practice (New York, 1902), 419- 420, cited in William R. Hutchinson, “A Moral Equivalent for Imperialism: Americans and the Promotion o f ‘Christian Civilization’, 1880-1910,” 172, in eds. Torben

Christensen and Hutchinson, Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era, 1880-1920

(Denmark: Christensens Bogtrykkeri, Bogtrykkergardena-s, Struer, 1982). Although neither Speer nor Hutchinson were specifically writing about female missionaries, the social institutions they do address were often the handiwork o f women. Denied positions reserved for clergy which involved pure evangelism, female missionaries concentrated their energies on the “civilizing” aspect o f the missionary enterprise. Hutchinson’s entire article was formative in this section.

growing internationalism and the influx o f modem anthropological and scientific thinking before women missionaries began to move away from an imperialist stance.

What the woman’s foreign missionary movement did offer, however, was the initiation o f hundreds o f thousands o f American women into ideas regarding cultural diversity. Initially, the relevance o f missionary overseas experience to American race relations may not be immediately visible to today’s historian. The Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic cultures that comprised much o f the missionary women’s experiences as well as the study materials for the women back home, did not address, at least on the surface, the unique realities o f racial strife in the United States. However, foreign missions possessed what one historian has called a “reflex influence.” In her discussion o f how the

movement affected home life, Patricia Hill argues that churchwomen at home gained a broadened perspective on other cultures.46 Through its introduction o f a systemic mission study at the local level, as well as its institution of mission schools, the woman’s foreign missionary movement instigated discussions examining such topics as cultural

differences and similarities, mores, customs and food. Churchwomen at home in the U.S. learned about gender roles, caste systems and non-Christian faiths without ever talcing a step outside their neighborhoods. Although the information was often laced with

imperialistic and ethnocentric sentiments, it nonetheless enlarged the lens through which they viewed their world.

46Patricia R. Hill, The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870-1920 (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1985), 108.

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In addition to preparing churchwomen at home for the possibility o f working cooperatively with people o f other cultures through its study guides and schools, the movement’s basic missiology, which professed that all people were children o f God, also laid the foundation for missionary women to eventually initiate race relations programs. Churchwomen at home familiar with foreign mission theory saw it shift significantly following World War I. progressing from a “Woman’s Work for Woman” missiology to one based on “World Friendship.” This shift can be traced across denominations by examining the annual mission study textbooks published by the Central Committee on the United Study o f Foreign Missions beginning in 1901. Although by the turn o f the

century most denominations already published missionary periodicals for groups to use in local churches, the Central Committee’s efforts were the first to cross denominations.47 The basic assumption reflected in the annual textbooks prior to the war was that women all over the world were sisters but that the non-Christian sisters needed saving. Hinduism and Islam, according to the “Woman’s Work for Woman” theory, oppressed and enslaved women. The task o f missionary women was to liberate their sisters by bringing them the light o f Christ. An example o f this is Caroline Atwater Mason’s 1902 text Lux Christi

which reads. "O f the average Hindu woman it can truly be said: her birth is unwelcome, her physical life is outraged, her mental life is stunted, her spiritual life is denied

existence.”48 In Mason’s assessment, the only hope for India and Hindu women was the

47Robert. 257-268.

4SCaroline Atwater Mason, Lux Christi, (Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions, 1902), 97 as quoted in Robert, 264.

light o f Christ:

The supreme hope and the supreme inspiration for India are in the light o f the knowledge o f the glory o f God in the face o f Jesus Christ....It is the surpassing glory and beauty o f Christianity that its prime motive is the willing sacrifice o f the individual, hoping nothing for himself, in order to bring healing and rescue to his fellow-men. The Cross o f Christ is the light o f India, the light o f the world.49 Although Mason’s text is not unlike many o f the foreign mission theory books published before the war, the most important text o f the period is Helen Barrett

Montgomery's Western Women in Eastern Lands, written in 1910 in honor o f the Jubilee.

Montgomery summarized the mission theory expressed by the women’s missionary movement: "non-Christian religions supported wrongs against women, whereas

Christianity emancipated them.”50 Montgomery acknowledged that women also suffered in western cultures but she argued that Christianity opposed the wrongdoings and did not cause women harm as did other religions. Western Women in Eastern Lands articulated

the goal o f the movement: unity among all peoples under one Christian God. Once unity was attained, the kingdom o f God would certainly have been established.51

World War I destroyed the “Woman’s Work for Woman” mission theory, and “World Friendship” emerged as the new banner for the missionary women’s movement. With the western Christian nations at war, killing one another in the name o f the same God,

missionary women reinterpreted their missiology as hypocritical and developed new

49Ibid.. 257-258 as quoted in Robert, 264.

50Helen Barrett Montgomery, Western Women in Eastern Lands (Central

Committee on the United Study o f Foreign Missions, 1910), 68 as quoted in Robert, 268. 5'Robert, 264-265.

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theories for the changing world situation. According to missions historian Dana Robert, "World Friendship” transformed the attitudes missionary women held for the various peoples they worked among. With this change, missionary women

assumed that western culture no longer had a monopoly on virtue, and that women around the world stood poised to lead their own people not to western Christian civilization, but to their own forms o f Christian life. What was needed o f missions was not paternalism, but partnership and friendship: united work for peace and justice.52

Furthermore, there is also evidence that missionary women revised older theories in response to resistance by foreign men and women to Christian evangelism. Such resistance prompted missionary women to subsume their quest for converts to an expanded mission that included education and medical relief.53

During the decade following World War I, this shift in missiology engendered a new sense o f internationalism among missionary women and with it a desire to create cooperative relationships with indigenous women. Schools and hospitals founded by American missionary women were slowly turned over to the control o f these women, whom female missionaries now recognized as partners. Indigenous women, educated by the schools opened and funded by American women, also gained leadership status in these institutions. In doing so, they challenged missionary women to shift their thinking.

In 1934. Michi Kawai and Ochimi Kubushiro, Japanese women who had chosen to convert to Christianity, authored the first mission study book to be written by non-

52Ibid„ 272-273. 53 Hill. 130-134.

western Christians: Japanese Women Speak: A Message from the Christian Women o f

Japan to the Christian Women o f America. Kawai and Kubushiro emphatically informed

American women that they were no longer needed as “bosses” in Japan. They were needed as friends and co-workers. They wrote,

Today, more than ever before, missionaries and Christian workers are needed who can come to Japan to live with us, work with us, and set us a loving Christ-like example. More than ever before, a spirit o f co-operation is needed where missionaries can work shoulder to shoulder with us in our search for a national Christian living and Christian thought.54

With this shift in thinking among both missionary and foreign women, churchwomen began to think o f their indigenous counterparts as being more like themselves than they had in the past. Although American women had considered foreign women as sisters prior to this change, Americans perceived themselves as the older, caretaker sister. With World War I. even this attitude began to dissipate.