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“Memorial Stones”: The Geography of Womanhood in Heathen Woman's Friend, 1869-1879

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Anne Blue Wills
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Extract

The accompanying engraving [see fig. 1] appeared in a mid-nineteenth-century issue of The Ladies' Repository. Its caption, “Missionary Cemetry [sic], Fuh-Chau, China,” gives an accurate enough description of the scene. The artist even included a legend identifying the missionary wives and children whose remains the graves held. It is difficult to know exactly in what spirit The Repository presented this engraving to its subscribers. But the shady silence of the scene, like a pictorial obituary, invites reflection on both the lives and the deaths of the entombed. Significantly, like an obituary, the embrace of the trees also draws one in to reflect on one's own life and eventual death.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , Summer 1997 , pp. 247 - 269
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1997

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References

Notes

The title for this essay comes from the title of an article by E. J. K. in Heathen Woman's Friend (November 1875): 107-8.

1. See Marsden, George M., Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 16–17 Google Scholar; see also Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 30–33.Google Scholar Kish Sklar's account of Catharine Beecher's resistance to her father Lyman's Calvinist entreaties puts flesh on the bones of a theological controversy.

2. In the early nineteenth Century, “Protestants … used the idea of death to exhort people to immediate action… . [T]he emphasis on human agency created considerable anxiety over death in the evangelical era.” Farrell, James J., Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 39.Google Scholar

3. See Welter, Barbara, “She Hath Done What She Could: Protestant Women's Missionary Careers in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Quarterly 30 (Winter 1978): 625.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Douglas, Ann, “Heaven Our Home: Consolation Literature in the Northern United States, 1830-1880,” in Death in America, ed. Stannard, David E. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 49.Google Scholar The genre of consolation literature in its nineteenth-century American incarnation calls for further study. Most helpful would be an opening exposition, that is, a catalogue of the genre that notes its different types and narrative shapes, functions, idiosyncracies, and readership.

In her article, Douglas argues that nineteenth-century American sentimental culture—of which consolation literature was one facet—enacted a kind of feminized revenge on the growing commerical (male) culture by ambiguously empowered middle-class women and evangelical clergy. Her book The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977; New York: Anchor Books, 1988) expands this thesis to encompass other aspects of nineteenth-century religious, domestic, and social practice. No scholar can hope to conduct a completely disinterested study, whatever the topic, nor should an energized and curious scholar want to. Douglas's take on consolation literature is a provocative look, but it is, perhaps, a better second step than a first introduction.

Nevertheless, Douglas's work remains the best available research on consolation literature. Others writing about death and death practices have less a historical than a theoretical interest. For example, in his classic work, Love and Death in the American Novel (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1962), Leslie Fiedler talks more about “American” than either love or death. One exception to this emphasis on the theoretical might be Philippe Aries's book L'Homme devant la mort (translated by Helen Weaver as The Hour of Our Death [London: Allen Lane, 1981]), but, in his discussion of nineteenth-century American obituaries and death literature, he merely restates the points of Douglas's “Heaven Our Home.”

Other works focus on deathbed customs in contexts other than nineteenth-century evangelical America and, besides, add little to an understanding of obituaries as a distinct brand of death literature. Examples include Michael Wheeler, , Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Reed, John R., Victorian Conventions (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; and Guthke, Karl, Last Words: Variations on a Theme in Cultural History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. See Douglas, , Feminization of American Culture, 214, 220.Google Scholar

6. See ibid., 223, 207.

7. See Philip N. Mulder, “Piety: Hope and Loss in the Obituaries of Nineteenth-Century Southern Evangelicals” (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1989), 37; see also, for example, obituaries for Josephine Copp and Lydia Waugh below.

8. Farrell, , Inventing the American Way of Death, 188.Google Scholar

9. Mulder, “Piety,” 11. Mulder further states that Evangelicals “believed that the moment of death brought God's evaluation of the person's overall piety, and the judgment determined the eternal fate of the person… . The death of another turned Evangelicals back to their ideals of piety, forcing them to evaluate not just the deceased's piety, but their own piety and their understanding of it” (ibid.).

10. I am here considering only the first decade of the Friend's run. During these years, with the founding of societies like the WFMS, women began to take Charge of their own missionary work, managing funds and sending personnel with greater autonomy from male-run parent boards, but the hold of domestic ideology and conservative evangelicalism was still strong. These forces created the tensions that appear in the obituaries discussed here.

11. Cott, Nancy F., The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 1–2.Google Scholar The phrase, Cott notes, comes from Welter, Barbara, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151-74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a less sympathetic but valuable Interpretation of the domesticity cult's impact on American culture, see Douglas, Feminization of American Culture.

12. Cott, , Bonds of Womanhood, 84–85.Google Scholar

13. Early on in the history of women's foreign mission societies, married missionary women were seen by their Sponsoring societies “as effective … if they did no more than create a model Christian home in an alien culture. In fact, most missionary wives found time for teaching and nursing— and resented any implication that they were not full partners with their husbands in the great task of evangelizing the heathen.” Hill, Patricia, The World Their Household: The American Woman's Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870-1920 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 72.Google Scholar

14. Quoted from an 1894 source in ibid., 60. Hill also notes that the WFMS, from its inception, had believed that its responsibility included “civilizing” as well as converting. Its “missionary intelligence,” frequently authored by missionaries, presented native customs in a sometimes horrific, sometimes comic, light (132).

15. See Brumberg, Joan Jacobs, “Zenanas and Girlless Villages: The Ethnology of American Evangelical Women, 1870-1910,” Journal of American History 69 (September 1982): 350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Douglas describes “feminine disestablishment,” which compelled women of the developing middle class in early to mid-century to reassert their cultural importance by exploiting their consumer power, becoming the ultimate arbiters of burgeoning consumer capitalism, and theorizing the category of “influence” or passive persuasion. See Douglas, , Feminization of American Culture, 44–79.Google Scholar

17. In the atmosphere of increasing industrialization, which took life more and more outside the home, “the question was how to regulate personal relations—how to regulate morality—if ‘the world’ had become an arena of amoral market struggles. The canon of domesticity answered by constituting the home as a redemptive counterpart to the world. Yet the ultimate function of the home was in the world. It was to fit men to pursue their worldly aims in a regulated way.” Cott, , Bonds of Womanhood, 97–98.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., 46-47, 84-85. Isabel Hart, of the WFMS, wrote in the March 1873 issue of Heathen Woman's Friend (hereafter HWF): “This is woman's era, not for unwomanly claims and clamor, but for deeper devotion, for fuller consecration, and growing out of these, more earnest and far-reaching activities. It is woman's era to be more womanly, in being more like her Lord and Master, Who went about doing good.” Cited in Hill, , World Their Household, 76.Google Scholar Hill also describes Catharine Beecher's vehement disapproval of the Grimke sisters' outspoken political activism in support of abolitionism, demonstrating that the shape of “womanliness” was contested then as now.

19. Christian women “feel that to the Gospel they owe the place of honor and of dignity which is theirs in this Christian land.” Hill, , World Their Household, 36 Google Scholar, quoting from Woman's Work for Woman (1871), the missionary Journal of the northern Presbyterian Church's Woman's Foreign Missionary Society Ministers claimed that Christianity alone “made ‘men willing to treat females as equals, and in some respects, as superiors’; only Christianity ‘exalt[ed] woman to an equal rank with man in all the felicities of the soul, in all the advantages of religious attainment, in all the prospects and hopes of immortality'; only Christianity redeemed human nature from the base passions and taught reverence for domestic relations.” Cott, , Bonds of Womanhood, 130.Google Scholar

20. Hill, , World Their Household, 60.Google Scholar

21. Beaver, R. Pierce, American Protestant Women in World Mission: A History of the First Feminist Movement in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 42 Google Scholar, quoting Isabel Hart. Converting heathen mothers was seen as the “most efficient means of Christianizing heathen lands”; moreover, “the transformation of heathen homes was possible precisely because, according to Victorian theories of the primacy of gender-determined characteristics, heathen women—despite their systematic degradation—had essentially the same nature as their Christian sisters in America. Evangelical women believed, when they looked on their heathen sisters, quite literally in the cliche, There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ ” Hill, , World Their Household, 5, 59.Google Scholar

Cf. Annesley, M., “Woman's Work for Woman,” HWF (October 1874): 734-35.Google Scholar This member of the New Hartford WFMS auxiliary wrote in on this subject: “The native Christian women seem to partake of the same Inspiration [as missionary women for spirituality and self-denial] in a degree, as they receive light and divine love in their hearts, and deny themselves that they may contribute their mites, and keep in line with their sister workers in more favored lands” (735, emphasis in original).

22. Hill, , World Their Household, 47.Google Scholar

23. Mrs.Clark, A. R., “Mrs. George E. Doughty,” HWF (August 1875): 37 Google Scholar (emphasis in original).

24. See, for example, Mrs. Chauncy Hobart, “Obituaries,” HWF (April 1875): 832, for a particularly touching account of maternal self-sacrifice. Mrs. Hobart wrote that Mrs. Fanny Grove lost her life through complications from childbirth, noting that she left behind a “babe six days old.” See also M. M. T., “Died,” HWF (May 1875): 847, in which Mrs. Susan Templar is also identified as a mother; and McCoy, Maggie A., HWF (August 1875): 38 Google Scholar, who praised Sarah A. Kam as an “excellent woman … a loving wife, a devoted mother, a kind neighbor—faithful in every known duty.”

Cf. Mrs.Ordway, M. S., “Obituaries,” HWF (September 1875): 63 Google Scholar; and Smith, Ra. A., “West Winfield, New York Branch annual report,” HWF (June 1876): 282 Google Scholar, both of which refer to two other Society members, Mrs. Agnes Miller and Mrs. Helen McAleer, respectively as “mothers in Israel,” Beaver, American Protestant Women, 49, cites an 1816 letter from American to British missionary wives that used the same phrase in praising them for their kindness and leadership.

25. Poems offering encouragement to the Society's members answered the fear that their work meant little in the scheme of (public) things. See, for example, Foster, H. A., “Sisters, May We Not Help?” HWF (November 1871): 197 Google Scholar, which likens the Society women to the woman who anointed Jesus with nard: “She did what she could.” See also Mrs.Bugbee, Emily J., “Humility,” HWF (March 1874): 613 Google Scholar; and Mrs.Thomson, Annie Howe, “The Widow's Mite,” HWF (April 1874): 629 Google Scholar, who both exhorted the reader to recognize the importance of being faithful in small things. See also H., “No Sheaves,” HWF (February 1874): 597, who praises those who help the missionary-reapers; their work is important, too.

The poem “Rejoicing in Hope,” also by Mrs. Thomson (HWF [January 1874]: 581, emphasis in original), predicts the honor that will redound to Society members on Resurrection Day:

Struggling here ‘mid cares and strife,
If we keep this end in view;
…………………
To extend thy cause abroad,
And increase thy foll'wers here;
Then, uprising from the sod,
Then, our glory shall appear.

26. Raymond, E. H., “Obituary,” HWF (December 1874): 767.Google Scholar

27. Warner, A. A. H., HWF (May 1875): 847 Google Scholar; J. F. W., “Died,” HWF (May 1875): 847; Mrs. C. G. Baird, HWF (May 1875): 847; Mrs. I. R. Barnum, HWF (August 1875): 39; Barnum, , HWF, 39 Google Scholar; Ordway, “Obituaries,” 63; Mrs. S. T. Barnum, “Died,” HWF (September 1875): 63; Mrs. K. W. Clarkson, “Died,” HWF (December 1875): 137; Thomas, Hattie L., “Died,” HWF (December 1875): 138 Google Scholar; Smith, “West Winfield, New York Branch annual report,” 281; Hoar, Bessie W., HWF (June 1876): 281 Google Scholar; Searles, L. B., HWF (June 1876): 281 Google Scholar; Searles, L. B., HWF (August 1874): 701 Google Scholar; A. E. D. B., “Died,” HWF (February 1876): 184.

28. Baird, HWF, 847; Mrs. G. W. Manley, HWF (April 1875): 832; McCoy, , HWF, 38 Google Scholar; Phister, Margaret H., “Died,” HWF (September 1875): 63 Google Scholar; J. F. Clarkson, “Died,”137; Searles, , HWF (June 1876): 281.Google Scholar

29. Mills, A., HWF (August 1875): 39.Google Scholar

30. Examples of these euphemisms can be found in Swift, A. M., “Obituary,” HWF (October 1874): 735 Google Scholar; Warner, , HWF, 847 Google Scholar; Mills, , HWF, 39 Google Scholar; J. F. W., HWF (September 1875): 63; Smith, “West Winfield, New York Branch annual report,” 281; and Hoar, , HWF, 280-81.Google Scholar

31. For example, “More promotions,” HWF (June 1873): 479; “Promoted,” HWF (April 1873): 447.

32. The title for this section is quoted in Welter, “She Hath Done What She Could,” 637. Welter takes the phrase from David Abeel's 1834 Journal of his work in China. See also Hunter, Jane, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 214 Google Scholar, where Hunter explains that Chinese men often expressed confusion about the gender of Western missionary women, whose size and demeanor did not fit patterns set by Chinese women.

33. Brumberg, “Zenanas and Girlless Villages,” 350. Of the missionaries sponsored by the WFMS, 98 percent had never been married, compared with 60 percent of the Congregationalist and Baptist female missionaries.

34. It is unclear if the Friend published a notice of every death that occurred in the field. One admonition from the editor in October 1875—for obituary writers to keep their contributions “as short as possible”—suggests that all news received on the subject would be printed (HWF [October 1875]: 84, emphasis in original).

35. J. F. W., “No Waste in God's Plan,” HWF (August 1874): 700; see also Rulison, S. A., “Jose M. Copp, M.D.,” HWF (October 1874): 733-34.Google Scholar Rulison's account tells more fully of Copp's conversion, training, illness, and death.

36. Rev. Baume, James, “Mrs. Lydia M. H. Waugh—In Memoriam,” HWF (September 1872): 330.Google Scholar

37. Ibid.

38. Prof. Jones, W. P., “Tribute to a Noble Life,” HWF (November 1872): 357 Google Scholar; his poem includes these lines:

She heeds them [heathen idols] not, for ‘neath
yon peepul's shade
The crowd attends; while her loved husband's
voice
Sounds the Evangel, —'Christ hath ransom
paid
For all mankind,'—and convert souls rejoice
…………………
Alas! thou canst not pain a wife's caress, —
A mother's patient care and fond embrace, —
The help man draws from loving watchfulness—
The gospel written in a wife's dear face.

39. Mrs. Thomson, Bishop, “On the Death of Mrs. Waugh,” HWF (October 1872): 341.Google Scholar

40. “Memorial Tribute,” HWF (August 1874): 695-96.

41. “Mrs. Wentworth,” HWF (August 1874): 702.

42. Dustin, Mary E., “Who Is Our Sister?” HWF (December 1873): 565.Google Scholar

43. Hill, , World Their Household, 64.Google Scholar

44. [?] Landon, HWF (June 1869): 8:

Our prayers be with them; we who know
The value of a soul to save,
Must pray for those who seek to show
The heathen hope beyond the grave.

45. “How Death Comes to the Hindoo Women,” HWF (April 1872): 264-65.

46. Lewis O. Saum, “Death in the Popular Mind of Pre-Civil War America,” in Death in America, ed. Stannard, 43-44, 46; and Mulder, “Piety,” 30-32. Both discuss the importance in the evangelical era of family members Standing close by in the last moments to offer comfort to and prayers for, and to witness to any last words from, the dying relative.

47. “Suicide among Native Women” and “Suttee,” HWF (April 1875): 827-28. The anonymous missionary author or authors expressed disbelief that illness or quarrels with family members could compel Indian women to take their own lives.

48. Miss L. L. Combs, M.D., “Death in a Chinese Home,” HWF (April 1876): 219-21. In her report, Combs contrasted the artificiality of heathen custom with the undeniable universality of the motherhood bond. In the midst of the “make-believe mourning” witnessed after the passing of a native woman, Combs could yet distinguish the voice of the deceased woman's daughter, a voice expressing the unmistakably authentic grief of a daughter for her lost mother (220). See also Rev. E. W. Parker, “Mohammedan Funeral Services,” HWF (October 1871): 188-89; Miss S. H. Woolston, “Mourning for the Empress,” HWF (August 1875): 26; and “A Parsee Funeral,” HWF (February 1876): 180. All disapprovingly describe the farming out of mourning to paid Surrogates.

49. Parker, “Mohammedan Funeral Services,” 189.

50. Mrs. Parker, “Moradabad Mission annual report,” HWF (July 1872): 299.

51. Mrs. Parker, “Obituary,” HWF (August 1871): 168-69; Parker, “Moradabad Mission annual report,” 299.

52. See Hill, , World Their Household, 48.Google Scholar

53. [Isabella] Thoburn, “Henrietta Green” HWF (October 1873): 535-36.

54. B. W., “Obituary,” HWF (August 1874): 699.

55. Fannie J. Sparkes, “Changes at Girls' Orphanage, Bareilly,” HWF (November 1875): 109.

56. Sparkes, Fannie J., “Bareilly, India Orphanage annual report,” HWF (July 1877): 281.Google Scholar

57. Mrs. Parker, “Moradabad Mission annual report,” HWF (July 1876): 12.

58. Mrs. Parker, “Died,” HWF (February 1876): 184-85. Mrs. Parker, the missionary in charge of the Moradabad effort, wrote of Ann Newhall, “I am sure those who have given of their means for her support, while they may be disappointed that she did not live to work, will rejoice with us that she died not as the heathen die, but has entered into eternal rest.”

59. See, for example, a report on Indian orphans, HWF (September 1871): 175-77. The girls' names include Hannah Jane Adams, Martha W. Martin, and Sophronia Hadsell.

60. I am indebted to Julie Byrne for her concise phrasing of this point, which emerged in the course of our conversations about this essay

61. The words are taken from a poem (1908) by John Oxenham, surely a declaration of the mission spirit.