使命中的母性:传教士、“异教徒”和美国共和国早期的母性理想

IF 0.2 Q2 HISTORY
Cassandra N. Berman
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引用次数: 0

摘要

本文在美国第一次海外传教运动的背景下考察母性。19世纪早期,随着第一代传教士前往国外——包括印度、缅甸和桑威奇群岛——人们开始关注那些既不是白人也不是基督徒的外国母亲的行为。在流行的文本中,这些妇女经常被描绘成有害的母亲,虐待、忽视或杀害自己的孩子,她们皈依基督教被吹捧为通往改革的唯一道路。这种所谓有害的“异教徒”母亲的比喻,为那些希望通过嫁给传教士向海外传教的美国妇女提供了强大的动力。在加入特派团的过程中,他们计划改变外国妇女的信仰,改变家庭和两性关系,并保护所谓的弱势儿童。然而,正如她们自己的作品经常揭示的那样,传教士的妻子们自己在很大程度上未能遵守早期共和母性的严格规定。以编辑出版的传教士妻子回忆录为视角,我认为,母性在美国公共生活中扮演的角色远比之前所承认的要复杂得多。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
Motherhood on a Mission: Missionaries, "Heathens," and the Maternal Ideal in the Early American Republic
abstract:This essay examines motherhood in the context of the United States' first foreign missionary movement. In the early nineteenth century, as the first generation of missionaries departed for foreign locations—including India, Burma, and the Sandwich Islands—concern began to mount over the behavior of foreign mothers who were neither white nor Christian. In popular texts, such women were frequently depicted as harmful mothers who abused, neglected, or killed their own children, and their conversion to Christianity was touted as the only path toward their reformation. This trope of the purportedly harmful, "heathen" mother served as powerful motivation for American women who hoped to evangelize overseas by marrying missionaries. In joining missions, they planned to convert foreign women, transform family and gender relations, and protect supposedly vulnerable children. Yet as their own writing frequently revealed, missionary wives themselves largely failed to conform to the rigorous strictures of early republican maternity. Using the edited and published memoirs of missionary wives as a lens, I argue that maternity served a far more complex role in American public life than has previously been acknowledged.
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CiteScore
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