2 - Gender, domesticity, and colonial evangelisation

Summary

Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather offers ‘a sustained quarrel with the project of imperialism, the cult of domesticity and the invention of industrial progress’ (4) and suggests that ‘imperialism cannot be understood without a theory of domestic space and its relations to the market’ (17). In a passing reference to colonial missionary work, McClintock suggests that

the mission station became a threshold institution for transforming domesticity rooted in European gender and class roles into domesticity as controlling a colonized people. Through the rituals of domesticity … animals, women, and colonized peoples were wrested from their putatively ‘natural’ yet, ironically, ‘unreasonable’ state of ‘savagery’ and inducted through the domestic progress narrative into a hierarchical relation to white men.

(34)

This book interrogates the coalition of imperialism, gender, domesticity, and colonial practice typified by nineteenth-century missionary experiences in colonial cultures. The later case studies in this book will examine the construction and maintenance of the colonial mission as a ‘threshold institution’ of both ideologies and practices through an examination of missionary texts and discourse. By way of introduction, this chapter examines the valency of gender in Protestant colonial missionary work, with specific reference to the LMS. I argue that missionaries' interventions into colonial gender and domesticity were productive of the ‘domestic progress narrative’ identified by McClintock, and discuss some of the ways in which missionary experiences were crucial in changing perceptions of gender and domesticity within Britain itself.