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

Summary

One Sunday morning in early November 1825, Kaahumanu, 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 laboured for four years, with their growing young family, on this unusual frontier. On this particular morning, Kaahumanu's bearers seated their chief's chair at the front of the chapel level with the preacher and, like him, facing the congregation (M. Whitney, Journal, 16 November 1825).

To the joy of the mission band, this powerful queen had already submitted to instruction in reading and writing and at a Honolulu school examination earlier in the year had written on her slate, ‘This is my word and hand. I am making myself strong. I declare in the presence of God, I repent of my sin, and believe God to be our Father’ (Missionary Herald, July 1825). This impressive matriarch, so enormous in size that Laura Judd, wife of the mission doctor, reported that ‘she could hold any of us in her lap, as she would a little child, which she often takes the liberty of doing’ (Carter 1899:26), had allotted tenancy rights for mission land and had expressed the encouraging belief that a ruler belonging to Christ's family should not only serve God personally but persuade her people to follow suit.