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Drudges, Shrews, and Unfit Mothers Representations of Papuan Women in the Publications of the London Missionary Society, 1873–1926

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Drudges, Shrews, and Unfit Mothers Representations of Papuan Women in the Publications of the London Missionary Society, 1873–1926 Social Sciences and Missions 31 (2018) 7–33 Social Sciences and Missions Sciences sociales et missions brill.com/ssm Drudges, Shrews, and Unfit Mothers Representations of Papuan Women in the Publications of the London Missionary Society, 1873–1926 John Barker University of British Columbia [email protected] Abstract Among the first Europeans to encounter and settle on the southeastern coast of New Guinea, members of the London Missionary Society contributed a large corpus of pub- lications concerning indigenous peoples from the mid-1870s until the rise of profes- sional anthropology in the 1920s. While these works focus mainly on the activities and concerns of men, women provide a key index of “civilization” relative to the working British middle class from which most missionaries came.This essay provides a survey of the portrayal of women in this literature over three partly overlapping periods, demon- strating a shift from racialist to moral discourses on the status of Papuan women – a shift that reflects transitions in both missionary and anthropological assumptions dur- ing this period. Résumé Les membres de la London Missionary Society, qui ont été parmi les premiers Euro- péens à atteindre la côte sud-est de la Nouvelle-Guinée et à s’y installer, ont produit un corpus important de publications sur les peuples autochtones, entre le milieu des années 1870 et les années 1920, qui marquent l’essor d’une anthropologie profession- nelle. Ces textes portent principalement sur les activités et les préoccupations des hommes, mais les femmes y sont aussi présentes comme un indice-clé du niveau de «civilisation », évalué par rapport à la classe moyenne laborieuse de Grande-Bretagne dont étaient issus les missionnaires. Cet article analyse la manière dont les femmes sont décrites dans ces écrits durant trois périodes qui se chevauchent en partie. Il montre une évolution d’un discours racialiste à un discours moral sur le statut des femmes papoues – une évolution qui reflète des transitions dans les présupposés à la fois mis- sionnaires et anthropologiques durant cette période. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/18748945-03101008Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 01:12:39PM via free access 8 barker Keywords missionaries – Papua New Guinea – women Mots-clés missionnaires – Papouasie Nouvelle-Guinée – femmes From the onset of the mission to southeastern New Guinea in 1871 to the retire- ment of a second generation of missionaries in the mid-1920s, members of the London Missionary Society (lms) published more than 80 articles and books on their labours among indigenous Papuans. In an earlier article1 I surveyed this literature to examine how, over a half century, missionary thinking about indigenous Papuan culture and society was mutually conditioned by the neces- sities of maintaining financial and material support from home congregations, changing fashions in anthropological thought, and their direct experiences in the mission field. In this paper, I focus specifically on the representation of women. While the situation of Papuan women was far from a central theme in this literature, it was both a recurrent and crucial element. My claim is that these representations served a dual purpose of justifying missionary inter- ventions and asserting the ethnographic authority of the authors. As thinking shifted on both fronts, so too did portrayals of women.2 Studying indigenous culture was incidental to missionary work during this period. Among the first whites to explore and settle along the southeastern coast of New Guinea, the pioneers were preoccupied with the tasks of estab- lishing friendly relations and setting up bases for future work while their suc- cessors’ days were taken up with administering an ever-growing mission estab- lishment as schools and churches spread along the coast. Once settled, lms missionaries were expected to systematically study local languages and reduce them to writing for purpose of translating the Gospels, hymns, and other reli- gious materials. They lived, however, largely apart from villagers in European 1 Barker (1996). 2 The initial research for this essay was carried out in 1978–1979 as a ma candidate at theVictoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, with the support of a Commonwealth Scholarship. I want to express my gratitude to the staff of Alexander Turnbull Library and my supervisor, Professor Ann Chowning. My thanks as well to Dr. Yannick Fer for his encouragement to return to this material and careful reading and corrections of the manuscript. Social Sciences andDownloaded Missions from Brill.com09/28/2021 31 (2018) 7–33 01:12:39PM via free access representations of papuan women in the lms publications 9 fashion on mission stations. For the most part, their observations of local cus- toms were far from systematic but gathered as time and interest allowed during patrols through the mission district and by questioning students and converts. Several lms missionaries published short ethnographic articles in anthropo- logical journals and three veteran missionaries compiled their observations into full-length books which served as both memoirs and ethnographies. Most of the missionaries, however, wrote specifically for congregations in their home churches as well as popular audiences enthralled with the exotic romance of the exploration of “savage” lands. In the wake of David Livingstone’s fame as an African explorer, the popular audience for missionary books in this period was impressively large and did much to fix Western notions of indigenous peoples. With the single exception of Edith Turner’s Among Papuan Women (1920), the lms publications were authored by men who devoted most of their atten- tion to the activities of Papuan men. Women remain largely unnoticed and unmentioned except in passages concerning daily work tasks, marriage, and child rearing. That said, there are very few missionary publications that fail to comment on the status of women. In these writings, gender is a key signi- fying domain in which we find considerable tension between representations of otherness and common humanity,3 reflecting a tension between the largely negative portrayal of “heathen” life and the fundamental assertion that the heathen themselves were redeemable.4 Brief and marginal as they tend to be, the descriptions of women’s lives and relationship to their menfolk also reflect changing notions of race and culture from the late Victorian age into the early twentieth century. In the following, I examine three sets of representative texts organized in overlapping chronological order. The first, dating from the 1870s into the early 1890s, concerns the pioneering phase of the missionary encounter during which lms missionaries were frequently the first Europeans to contact the coastal Papuan societies. The second, dating from around 1900 to 1920, focuses on missionary publications intended to inform and raise support from home churches. The final section examines three full-length missionary memoir- ethnographies, published in the mid-1920s. Before proceeding, a couple of clarifications are called for. First, my focus here is on missionary descriptions and characterizations of indigenous Papuan society prior to Christian conversion. Very often missionary publications con- clude with contrasting portraits of Christianizing communities which serve, 3 Comaroff and Comaroff (1991), pp. 105ff. 4 Thomas (1992). Social Sciences and Missions 31 (2018) 7–33 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 01:12:39PM via free access 10 barker among other things, to justify missionary interventions. In the case of women, these turn out to be predictable endorsements of (then) conventional notions of Western middleclass domesticity. I reference these representations in con- nection to missionary propaganda where they are the most obvious and rel- evant to understanding the ways missionaries tended to perceive indigenous women but leave a fuller study to the future. Second, I make no effort in what follows to determine the ethnographic accuracy or lack thereof of missionary ethnological observations. I am surveying a diverse literature that ranges from casual observations based upon the briefest of encounters to highly detailed accounts of local communities based upon years of interactions and familiar- ity with local languages.While the historical value of the publications is beyond doubt, accessing their ethnological accuracy is best left to those with expertise in the various communities they cover. Drudges and Shrews: The Portrayal of Papuan Women in the Pioneering Literature The New Guinea mission marked the last major endeavor of the London Mis- sionary Society (lms) in the South Pacific.5 The mission had encountered little but disaster in its initial forays into the Society Islands, Tonga and the Mar- quesas in the 1790s. With the conversion of high chiefs like Pomare ii in Tahiti, however, the lms in alliance with Methodist missionaries rapidly won converts across Polynesia. The movement into the Melanesian islands, which lacked such powerful leaders, proved much more difficult. On his initial visit to the New Hebrides in 1839, John Williams and a companion were clubbed down on the beach of Erromango and the lms decided to cede the evangelization of the islands to Scottish-Canadian Presbyterians. A mission on Lifou island enjoyed more success among the locals but came under increasing pressure from the French administration of the penal colony on New Caledonia uncomfortable with the presence of British
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