Browse
This chapter explores the dynamics of parenting in the missionary context, and how missionaries conceptualised and understood their role as parents. Male and female missionaries on the spiritual frontier had to deal with the all the difficulties and delights of parenthood in a state of perceived racial and cultural isolation, often as a family alone in a sea of foreign, if not hostile, people. While the complementarity of missionary parenting ultimately defies neatly gendered encapsulations, meanwhile, the chapter puts forward the argument that there developed in mission practice a broadly gendered understanding of missionary parenting. While mothers were more concerned with the day-to-day practicalities of life, fathers fretted about their children's long-term spiritual and economic prospects. Missionary parents also exercised a constant vigilance against their children's social interaction with indigenous people. Missionary parenting was fraught with anxiety and concern: temporal and eternal, material and spiritual.
This chapter traces the institutional history of the missionary couple's place within London Missionary Society (LMS) mission objectives in the nineteenth century from initial institutional ambivalence about the missionary wife, through her ascendency in mid-century, to her partial marginalisation upon the arrival of single 'lady' missionaries from 1875 onwards. The rise and demise of missionary wives, and more broadly the changing dynamics and interplay between the white missionary couple and evangelical mission theory, dramatically shaped the history of the evangelical missionary movement in the nineteenth century. George Thom frequently concerned himself with the practical mechanics of missionary marriage: intermarriage, provision for widows and orphans, and the legal status of non-conformist marriage in southern Africa. Western women, in colonial rhetoric, embodied a discomfort with the homosocial culture, and racial intermarriage, of the frontier.