Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai‘i’s Pacific World by Jennifer Thigpen (review)

IN THIS INTERESTING AND PERSUASIVE NEW STUDY, Jennifer Thigpen examines interactions between Hawaiian royal women and the wives of American Protestant missionaries in nineteenth-century Hawai‘i. Published by UNC Press as part of its Gender and American Culture series, the book covers two generations of Hawaiian history, from the rise of Kamehameha in the 1780s to the rule of his widow Ka‘ahumanu in 1825. Mining a large trove of missionary literature and earlier explorers’ accounts, Thigpen argues that Hawaiian and American women played crucial diplomatic roles in colonial Hawai‘i by engaging in reciprocal gift exchanges. Women’s interactions were an important site of intercultural understanding that greased the skids for the mission project and eventually launched American missionaries into positions of power and considerable influence on the Islands.

Island Queens and Mission Wives advances the scholarship on missionary and Hawaiian women pioneered by historians such as Patricia Grimshaw and May Zwiep. While scholars have separately examined Hawaiian noblewomen and American missionary wives (who could not properly be missionaries), Thigpen breaks new ground by investigating the generative encounters between the two groups, thereby moving Hawaiians “out of the margins” of the missionary story (6). The author correctly identifies gender and colonialism as “intersecting categories” in colonial Hawai‘i and the broader “emergent Pacific world” (5, 2–3).

Chapter 1 sets the stage by exploring King Kamehameha’s rise to power and his strategic dealings with European and American traders and explorers. Thigpen argues that “island queens” (Hawaiian royal women) “emulated” Kamehameha’s diplomatic style in their own dealings with foreign visitors after the king’s death (12). The following chapter, which takes place mostly in New England, surveys missionary gender ideology and the ways in which gender “informed” the structure and operation of the Hawaiian mission (31). Men were to be in charge of most missionary operations, and wives were to remain on the “periphery” (33). Hawaiian noblewomen, by contrast, wielded considerable societal influence and real political power on the Islands. The missionaries’ gender notions would thus be challenged immediately in Hawai‘i. Chapter 3 chronicles the cultural encounter between the missionaries and ali‘i (the Hawaiian ruling class) in 1820. The author explores missionary efforts to convert and “civilize” Islanders. That program was complicated by ali‘i disunity, foreign residents unfriendly to the mission, and a constant stream of visitors that threatened to destabilize the Islands.

Chapter 4 is the heart of the book and its most important contribution. Since most male ali‘i were not interested in Christianity in 1820, Hawaiian royal women became critical to the mission’s goals. Ali‘i women initiated reciprocal gift exchanges (especially of clothing) with mission wives that became an important site of diplomacy and even of politics. Stitching a dress for a royal woman or trading a bolt of cloth put the mission wife in a position of unusual influence. Women’s gift exchanges provided frequent contact and greater intimacy between the two parties, drawing missionaries and ali‘i into an “enduring cycle of exchange” that determined the nature of their interactions and the future success of the mission (66).

A final chapter explores the “increasingly gendered nature” of mission-produced conversion narratives after 1825 (85). This literature reimagined the unanticipated and dynamic exchanges between mission wives and ali‘i women as a case of Hawaiian royal women accepting Western gender norms, and thereby taking the “first step” toward Christian civilization (85). The reality, Thigpen suggests, was more complicated. Hawaiian royal women incorporated the missionaries (and their teachings) into the Kingdom for various reasons, while Native culture itself proved “resilient and adaptive” (104). On the question of what “conversion” meant to ali‘i women who adopted Christian religious practice and rhetoric, Thigpen is agnostic.

Island Queens and Mission Wives generates a number of important questions for scholars of Hawaiian and broader Indigenous history. Missionary wives struggled, as Thigpen notes...