New England missionary wives, Hawaiian women and ‘The Cult of True Womanhood’

Bibliographic Data

ID23136016
AuthorsPatricia Grimshaw (The University of Melbourne, corresponding author)
Year1989
Pages19-44
Publication date1989-11-24
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueFamily and Gender in the Pacific (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/cbo9781139084864.002
OpenAlexW2236179747
ISBN9781139084864
LanguageEN
Citations received13

Soon after their arrival in Hawai'i in 1820, and over the next three decades, New England missionary women embarked on an ambitious plan to transform Hawaiian girls and women to notions of femininity unheld by their culture.The experience of New England and Hawaiian intercultural contact was an ironical one that approached tragedy.The New England Americans sacrificed much personal comfort, suffered homesickness, ill health, and heartache, in their effort to transform Hawaiian lives.Yet they tended to attack, along with destructive elements in the processes of foreign incursion, many of the very aspects of Hawaiian culture which afforded Hawaiian women some measure of autonomy within their own social system.Meanwhile, the Americans were powerless to reproduce for their protege's the framework which afforded American women informal power within American society.An event of 1825 1S illustrative of the missionary aim to instruct Hawaiian females in "the cult of true womanhood."On a Sunday morning in early November of that year, Ka'ahumanu, aweinspiring queen regent of the Hawaiian Islands, widow of the great warrior chief Kamehameha, was carried into the Christian mission chapel at Waimea for the morning service.The preacher was Samuel Whitney, his wife Mercy Partridge Whitney, New England Protestant missionaries supported by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.The Whitneys had arrived with the first contingent of missionaries in 1820, and had labored for five years, with their growing young family, on this unusual frontier.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Borough · Chapel · Cult · Frontier · Morning · Political science · Protestantism · Queen (butterfly) · Regent · SWORD · Wife · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Engineering · History · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Religious studies