Domestic Frontiers: Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East

Conclusion

166 Conclusion & In an era of massive political disruption, Protestantism and Ottomanism alike extended to Bulgarian Orthodox Christians the option of a supranational identity that transcended traditional markers of distinctiveness. American missionaries worked to bring Bulgarians into a global community of Protestant Christians, but they succeeded in exacerbating the splintering of Ottoman society by adding to religious segmentation. Ottoman reformers tried to mold the sultan’s subjects into Ottoman citizens, regardless of religion and ethnicity, but they succeeded in facilitating increasing expressions of nationalism among the expanding middle classes, which the missionaries then supported through their work of translation and education. The missionaries and the Ottomans failed in the face of an encroaching nationalism that exploited religion and language as long as they were useful to unify Bulgarians against Ottoman reforms. Bulgarian nationalists found that a gendered language of religious reform in the service of the home and nation served their purposes admirably to thwart both Protestant and Ottoman pressures. At the same time, women missionaries turned this domestic discourse into an instrument of Christian feminism to promote their own internationalist goals. From 1831 to 1908, the shifting fissures in American and Ottoman conclusion s 167 society delineated the possibilities and limits of American cultural and religious expansion in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East. In Istanbul and other towns, Protestant-Orthodox encounters reveal the connections among evangelical Protestant traditions, American imperial culture, Balkan nationalisms , Ottoman imperial reforms, and an emergent Christian feminist internationalism. They illuminate the ways in which American ideas about gender, religion, and race cross boundaries and are redeployed by new actors in diverse contexts. A transnational approach to the study of these events, which span a period of tremendous social change in the United States and the Ottoman Balkans, broadens the debate about the substance, extent, and impact of the American Protestant empire. Gender, religion, and race were central to understandings of the American Christian home and nation in the United States in the nineteenth century . The educated Christian (Protestant) mother stood at the center of both, shaping the character of the family, guarding the borders of home and nation, contributing to national progress, and justifying continental expansion . In the preceding chapters I have traced the cultural formation of the Christian home to the Ottoman Balkans, where American Protestant missionaries employed a language of domesticity to shape their mission culture and to win Christian Orthodox women to Protestantism. As the encounters analyzed here indicate, the Christian home was a very flexible construct. It contained inherent contradictions that proved useful to a wide range of individuals , men as well as women, Orthodox as well as Protestant, Bulgarian as well as American. The language of domesticity was redeployed in contexts unimagined by those who originally articulated it, and its adaptability helps explain its durability. The cultural formation of the Christian home remained a steadfast ideal of the missionary enterprise even as the flexibility of domestic discourse was negotiated and manipulated to shape a myriad of expressions and behaviors. When Elizabeth Dwight was concerned about the character of her children growing up in Istanbul in the 1830s, she shared her worries with readers in the United States. Emphasizing the loneliness and the difficulty of her task, she wrote that “a mother must be the model, and almost the only model of virtue and religion her children will have.”1 Martha Jane Riggs somewhat more optimistically shared her views about the connections of motherhood 168 s conclusion to religion and national progress when she urged her Bulgarian readers to prepare themselves for their responsibilities. They had the duty to shape “the character of nations as well as individuals,” she wrote.2 Nowhere were ideas about home, family, and nation more intensely experienced than by missionary wives as they sought to serve as examples to the women among whom they labored while nurturing their own children in their New England faith and culture. Within the patriarchal order of missionary society, wives were expected to exert their moral authority, but they were also expected to be deferential to the male head of the household. Male and female missionaries alike extolled the virtues of American women as shapers of modern families and civilized nations, yet few men saw the contradiction in demanding that wives extend their domestic sphere to include supervision of a boarding school. Most men looked to their wives to support them in their own work. Men like Lewis...