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  • Transcending Cross-Cultural Frontiers: Gender, Religion, Race, and Nation in Asia and the Near East
  • Mona L. Siegel (bio)
Elizabeth Dorn Lublin. Reforming Japan: The Women’s Christian Temperance Union in the Meiji Period. Honolulu: The University of Hawai’i Press, 2013. Ix+252 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8248-35224 (pb).
Barbara Reeves-Ellington. Domestic Frontiers: Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and Near East. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013. Xvi+203 pp.; ill. ISBN: 978-1-55849-981-2 (pb).
Rosemary Seton. Western Daughters in Eastern Lands: British Missionary Women in Asia. Santa Monica: Praeger, 2013. Xxiv+221 pp.; ill. ISBN: 978-1-84645-017-4 (cl).
Connie A. Shemo. The Medical Ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, 1872–1937. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011. Xii+277pp.; ill. ISBN: 978-1-61146-085-8 (cl).

Female missionaries have never had it easy. First, women had trouble getting their foot in the door. Although Catholics had begun sending out missionary nuns working independently from men in the early nineteenth century, Protestant missionary societies were much slower to admit that white women had a role to play in evangelical work beyond tending the homes of the male missionaries at the heart of the enterprise.1 Even as they began actively recruiting single women in the second half of the nineteenth century, missionary societies continued to treat white women as second-class citizens in terms of salary, status, and power. Indigenous female converts fared even worse; despite their centrality to evangelicals’ goals, indigenous Bible women were among the lowest paid of mission staff and were frequently the objects of ridicule among both missionary and indigenous communities.

Until very recently, historians have done relatively little to boost the reputation of female missionaries or to deepen our understanding of the roles they played in shaping the broad sweep of cultures with which they interacted. This omission in historical scholarship is understandable. Among predominantly secularized and globally minded Western academics, the [End Page 187] unabashed religious piety and self-proclaimed cultural superiority of female missionaries fail to resonate. By and large, female missionaries’ aspirations are no longer our own, and, until recently, their history has failed to excite our interest.

Thanks to a recent body of scholarship, historians have started to make up for this indifference, insisting that missionaries served a much more complex role abroad than simply exporting Christian morality or providing cover for Western expansion and exploitation. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, female missionaries were as influenced by the cultural imperatives of indigenous nationalism and emergent feminism as they were by Christian evangelism or Western imperialism. Missionary outposts in turn became fertile sites of cross-cultural exchange, where Western and indigenous women and men explored and tested social hierarchies defined by gender and race as well as religion. To understand missionary women’s aspirations and frustrations is to understand better the challenges inherent in the construction of modern political and social institutions—empire, nation, and modernity—across much of the globe.

The four books under review here all focus on one, albeit large, geographic piece of this puzzle: Anglo-American Protestant missionary activity and temperance work in Asia and the Near East. Together, the efforts of these missionaries represented no small endeavor. China, Japan, India, and the Ottoman Empire all witnessed an influx of female missionaries after the 1870s. By the end of the nineteenth century, white female missionaries outnumbered their male counterparts in all of these countries. Female missionaries’ labors, moreover, helped to elevate indigenous female converts to new positions of authority. In China and Japan, Asian female missionaries and temperance workers actively challenged the presumed racial and gender hierarchies that structured the evangelical communities in which they worked, even as they sought to shape moral and political discourse in their home countries. Some of the best recent scholarship in the field—including several of the books reviewed here—particularly emphasizes the experiences and aspirations of indigenous converts, highlighting the truly transnational and multidirectional character of the missionary enterprise.

Despite their common historical subject, each of these books offers its own geographic focus and unique analytical framework. Rosemary Seton’s Western Daughters in...

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