Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries (review)

Contemporary scholars have neglected the study of missionary women, Porterfield suggests, for at least two reasons: Not only were they women, whose accomplishments are often overlooked, but they were also Christians, whose motives and achievements are frequently misunderstood. As Bordin did in her work on the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Porterfield calls to our attention the achievements of women that we might ignore because we find their religious and social outlooks to be alien. ¹ She seeks to rehabilitate their historical image with a study that both emphasizes the opportunities missionary work presented for American women in the early nineteenth century and recognizes the shortcomings of such women and their efforts. Challenging the “secular feminist perspective” of American women’s history and the failure of historians of the American Revolution and early republic “to appreciate the importance of religion in social and intellectual change,” Porterfield asserts the significance of her subjects to the history of this country’s women and to the history of the United States’ foreign relations (26, 36).

Porterfield begins with Mary Lyon because Mount Holyoke was more closely associated with women missionaries than any other institution. Seeking the sources of Lyon’s dedication to women’s education, Porterfield looks both to Christian ideas of disinterested benevolence and to “Republican Motherhood,” the set of notions about women’s relationship to the state outlined by Kerber. ² Whereas Republican Motherhood justified women’s education, the missionary life offered women the possibility of self-actualization through womanly and Christian self-sacrifice, representing a greater opportunity for activism and achievement than any other field in the early nineteenth century. At Mount Holyoke, Lyon created a Christian community based on the New Divinity thought associated with Samuel Hopkins and Jonathan Edwards. She encouraged conversion and missionary zeal in her students by emphasizing the similarity between the souls of missionaries and those of the people that they sought to convert. Lyon successfully nurtured a number of missionaries whose work had significant cultural impacts in Persia, western India, and southern Africa. In the end, however, these women were unable to recreate the kind of Christian community that they had left behind because they believed indigenous women to be different from themselves and therefore failed to see the fundamental similarities on which a Christian community would be based.

At a time when the United States’ foreign-policy interests were focused on the Americas, missionary activity in the three areas that Porterfield discusses represented the nation, contributing to the transformation of indigenous cultures and widely influencing their later relations with the United States. At Fiske Seminary in Persia, missionaries educated Nestorian women and encouraged them to reject such practices of Middle Eastern gender differentiation as veiling and female sequestering. These cultural changes exacerbated conflicts between Nestorians and the dominant Muslim culture, and the Nestorians suffered persecution and eventual decline as a result.

In Maharashtra in western India, missionaries were less successful in their efforts to convert Hindus to Christianity. They did, however, unwittingly stimulate a revitalization of Hindu iconoclastic piety. Female piety and shared ideas about women’s social roles played a crucial part in this cultural transformation: “A shared belief in women’s responsibility for maintaining the patriarchal structure of society established a framework within which Hindus drew on missionary concerns for social welfare and women’s education” (88).

As they had in Persia and India, missionary efforts in Zululand and Natal in southern Africa contributed to the formation of a Western-educated elite interested in social reform. African missionaries, however, were less able than those in any other region to overcome their strong sense of the cultural differences between themselves and the indigenous women that they hoped to convert. Combined with the internal and external political pressures experienced by the people of Natal and Zululand, the actions of missionaries led inadvertently to the creation of indigenous religious leadership among African Christians.

Employing contemporary psychological theories, a broad knowledge of comparative religions, and an interest...