Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866

6. Civilizing Domesticity

{ 156 } Civilizing Domesticity The Jamaica Mission is remarkable for the number of single women it employed in the decades before the Civil War. Twelve single women schoolteachers worked for the Jamaica Mission, while the much larger American Board, founded over thirty years before the ama, had only employed thirty single women by 1860.1 The ama’s Oberlin roots as well as its abolitionist politics made it more open to female missionaries, particularly when it came to single women as moral stewards. Young white women had been among the first volunteers to teach in black schools in the United States in the 1830s, and they similarly relished the opportunity to serve God through teaching freed people in Jamaica. Therefore, while few letters exist from missionary wives, making it difficult to compare the abolitionist women in Jamaica with Patricia Grimshaw’s missionaries in Hawaii, or Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s study of Adoniram Judson’s several wives in Burma, the Jamaica Mission calls attention to single women mis6 civilizing domesticity { 15 } sionaries and their ideas about the civilizing mission as well as their place in the mission family.2 The single women schoolteachers who joined the mission almost always lived with a minister and his wife, and they were expected to act the part of daughters in the mission family. For some women, this was an ideal arrangement , while others wanted greater independence. Maria Hicks was a perfect example of the ideal missionary daughter. In her first letter to the ama after getting to Jamaica, she noted that Mary Dean would be “away off at Chesterfield by herself.” In contrast, Hicks was to live with the Way family at Oberlin, and she remarked that “Bro. and Sister Way treat me with parental kindness, aiding me much in my labors.” Whereas some of the missionary women felt constrained by the mission family, Hicks appreciated the Ways, and she also asked George Whipple for advice. She wrote that she had read “Paul’s excellent epistle to Peter” many times, but she still awaited “Whipple’s letter of instructions to Maria.”3 Maria Hicks, like a number of other unmarried missionary women, would not remain unattached for long, and she married Thomas Oughton, a son of a British missionary and an attorney in Kingston. The expectations for married women in the mission were less well de- fined. Were missionary wives to be helpmeets for their husbands, or were they to conduct their own missionary work, as teachers? Unlike the single women, they would receive no payment for their work. The paucity of letters from missionary wives adds to the challenge of explaining how these women understood their role in the mission. From what little evidence exists, it appears that like the unmarried schoolteachers, missionary wives had a variety of views on their duties. The majority of the mission’s wives focused on their duties within their household. They wrote few letters to the ama, and their husbands, the heads of the households, represented their interests. This was in spite of the fact that many of the women had been quite involved in reform activities at Oberlin. Lucy Evarts, for one, had been a senior at Oberlin when she faced down a group of white vigilantes who tried to thwart her efforts to teach at a black school in Pike County, Ohio. What is most striking about women in the Jamaica Mission are the absences. That these college-educated women who had been active in moral reform and abolitionism at Oberlin did not establish a women’s organization in Jamaica, as women did in other mission fields, raises questions.4 Did the women focus more on teaching at their mission { 158 } chapter six stations and caring for the many dependents in their households than on improving society more generally? Did the distance between the mission stations and the hard-to-navigate terrain limit their access to one another? Or was it the racial and gendered hierarchies of the mission family that circumscribed the role white women would play in the mission? From the ministers’ letters, it seems that few married women in the 1840s and early 1850s attempted to expand their role in the mission, with the exception of Lucy Evarts’s unorthodox decision to become John Hyde’s “spiritual wife.” But this silence changed in the late 1850s when Sarah Ingraham Penfield joined the Jamaica Mission. She and her...