Paths of Duty Paths of Duty American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii Patricia Grimshaw Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 In- ternational (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits readers to freely download and share the work in print or electronic format for non-commercial purposes, so long as credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require per- mission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The Cre- ative Commons license described above does not apply to any material that is separately copyrighted. Open Access ISBNs: 9780824879136 (PDF) 9780824879129 (EPUB) This version created: 17 May, 2019 Please visit www.hawaiiopen.org for more Open Access works from University of Hawai‘i Press. © 1989 Patricia Grimshaw All Rights Reserved To the memory of my mother and father, Florence Kennedy Sinclair and Ernest Duncan Sinclair CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vi INTRODUCTION Changing Worlds 1 CHAPTER ONE Christian Brides 14 CHAPTER TWO Intrepid Pilgrims 37 CHAPTER THREE Dearest Friends 64 CHAPTER FOUR Pious Wives 87 CHAPTER FIVE Prudent Helpmeets 112 CHAPTER SIX Faithful Mothers 140 CHAPTER SEVEN Devoted Missionaries 165 CHAPTER EIGHT Family Fortunes 190 NOTES 208 BIBLIOGRAPHY 247 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 265 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Several people have taken an interest in the development of my research, and I should like to express my gratitude to them. Lela Goodell and Mary-Jane Knight of the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library, and Barbara Dunn of the Hawaiian Historical Society, remained helpful and enthusiastic about my enterprise during my research visits, and I appreciate their support enormously. Friends and colleagues offered useful in- sights at various stages of my work: Chips Sowerwine, Norma Grieve, Marilyn Lake, Donna Merwick, my husband Roger Grimshaw, and above all Greg Dening, who has with generosity shared the wealth of his ideas with me over the years. I am grateful to postgraduate and faculty members of the Melbourne Feminist History Seminar, who have provided a stimulating forum for pursuing the challenging insights of feminist history. I thank also Jane Koetsveld, who undertook the task of preparing the manuscript on disk with skill and patience, and Lynne Wrout, of the History Department office, for her continuing valued support. My children, David, Kathy, Sarah, and Andrew, cheerfully shared in this research project for many years. Fi- nally I express my appreciation of the careful work of members of the editorial staff at the University of Hawaii Press. vi INTRODUCTION Changing Worlds It has been said that the lives of happy women—like happy nations—are never written. —H. A. Carter, Kaahumanu, 1899 Eighty women became involved in the work of the American Protestant mission to Hawaii in the first three decades of its ex- istence, from 1819 to the mid-century. They were daughters, for the most part, of New England parents, some of whom had mi- grated eastward into New York State since the Revolution. They were daughters, too, of the enthusiastic nationalism of the early nineteenth century, daughters of the “second great awakening” and the “ferment of reform.” From New England’s shores they went forth confident of the moral superiority of American so- ciety, abounding in enthusiasm for transmitting its spiritual for- mulations and cultural systems to those ignorant of its virtues. These young women were not marginal figures in their own social worlds; on the contrary, they showed peculiar sensitiv- ity to its tendencies and were representative of its central cul- tural beliefs. To understand the engagement of these women in the mission cause, and the nature of their life during the years they spent on an exotic and distant frontier, is to perceive the women’s course within the context of American society in the first half of the nineteenth century. The women had been born and bred in America. During their years in the mission field, successive new arrivals, both to the mission and to secular pur- suits, brought knowledge of the shifting life of their homeland. Avid reading of letters, newspapers, and books ensured, again, the continuing influence of American manners and mores. The women of the Hawaiian mission grew to early maturity in a postrevolutionary northeastern America which was under- going a significant economic and social transformation. Few 1 Changing Worlds lives remained untouched by shifts in the economy which ushered in the more urbanized and complex social world of an increasingly industrialized and capitalistic economy. The small- scale but influential shift from household to factory production was accompanied by increasing specialization in agriculture and dependency on wider markets. An increasing number of people became engaged in wage labor, the population became more mobile, and there was a concomitant growth of urban centers of population. 1 The traditional labor patterns of women adapted to a situ- ation where the traditional household economy felt the impact of new demands in the marketplace. Single women increasingly followed their customary work of spinning and weaving out of the home to assume it in revised fashion in the paid work force engaged in the new mills and factories. Others sought employment in the expanding common schools or private acad- emies, an incentive to the furtherance of their own education as opportunities opened in the field of female education. Married women, by contrast, remained attached in a domestically ori- ented world in which they were increasingly relieved of their important productive labor. Wives’ work for the physical main- tenance of family members remained valuable, of course. Of en- hanced importance was their child-care role, as men more often traveled to distant daily workplaces, leaving the supervision of children essentially to women. 2 Simultaneously with the economic transformation of the early national period, a subtly related reformulation of defin- itions of femininity and masculinity took shape within a par- ticular religious context from which it gained inspiration and legitimation. As workplace and home became divided, so too did specific gender identification emerge—the man associated with public life, the woman with the domestic arena, which was valorized in new, emphatic ways as the site of comfort, se- curity, and admirable moral values. At the center of this sphere of human regeneration was the noble figure of the wife and mother, presented in idealistic form as giving moral and spir- itual impetus to the family, not superseding the husband’s proper authority, yet complementing his role, and influencing him always in an upright direction. Such a definition of femi- ninity encompassed the duty of women to engage in charitable and religious activities, extending the moral values of domes- ticity to soften the ill effects of the harsh, competitive world of consumer capitalism. 3 2 Paths of Duty Within that public sphere were, of course, increasing numbers of single paid female workers: The contradiction was negotiated apparently rationally, as such employment, certainly with respect to teaching, and its educational prerequisites, were described in moral rather than in economic terms. “It is paganism to keep the female sex in ignorance,” ran an article in the Panoplist and Missionary Magazine in 1819 which nicely captured the mood. Christianity had restored to women many of their rights and raised them from servitude; the light of the gospel inspired women’s hearts as well as men’s. “Then let the light of science illuminate their minds, nor let women be compelled to think that their sphere is that of the butterfly, to flutter in useless gaiety, and wandering thoughtless.” As teachers, women could go where men could not be supported, even to remote places where God’s angels, if no one else, could behold the pious female “in her little circle of affectionate pupils, laboriously and anxiously instructing the objects of her care to fear, and love, and serve their God.” 4 Women’s spiritual leadership could act as a regenerative force in the lives of future citizens whether in the home or in the classroom. This redefinition of femininity was rooted in the Protestant forms of Congregational and Presbyterian Christianity that pre- dominated in the region. The waves of religious revivals which waxed and waned through the villages and towns of the northeast at the turn of the century, led by such preachers as Asahel Nettleton, Lyman Beecher, and Charles Grandison Finney, modified Calvinistic beliefs to emphasize the indi- vidual’s spiritual responsibility in the search for salvation; the thrust of duty for the convert was toward evangelical outreach of some kind. Women were central in the revivals, as partic- ipants and as prayer leaders among their own sex, even at times engaging more controversially in leadership in mixed gatherings. 5 Women were central, too, in the social reform initiatives of the succeeding decades—distributing pious literature, re- deeming drunkards from the slavery of alcohol, saving pros- titutes from sexual degradation, promoting peace, teaching children of the poor in urban settings, campaigning for the abo- lition of slavery. For the most part the women’s engagement was described in sex-specific terms with emphasis on their par- ticular contribution to the redemption of the unfortunate, the ignorant, and the irreligious, especially those of their own sex. 3 Changing Worlds Women were urged to view themselves as moral crusaders and to associate in female organizations by virtue of a cultural defi- nition which stressed their special nature, their special roles. 6 Among the religious and philanthropic initiatives of the period was one which shifted its horizons beyond American shores to the many peoples of the world who stood outside of Western Christian culture and whose foreign ways were in- creasingly often described to an incredulous Christian public by travelers and explorers.