The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School MISSIONARIES OF MODERNITY: THE WOMEN’S MISSIONARY MOVEMENT AND THE EXPANSION OF FEMALE EDUCATION OUTSIDE THE WEST, 1950-2010 A Thesis in Sociology by Kerby Goff © 2019 Kerby Goff Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts August 2019 ii The thesis of Kerby Goff was reviewed and approved* by the following: Roger Finke Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Religious Studies, and International Affairs Director of the Association of Religion Data Archives (theARDA.com) Thesis Adviser David Baker Professor of Sociology, Education, and Demography Nancy Luke Associate Professor of Sociology and Demography Charles Seguin Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Data Analytics Jennifer Van Hook Roy C. Buck Professor of Sociology and Demography Director, Graduate Program in Sociology *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii Abstract Traditional explanations of the expansion of female mass education outside the West tend to privilege state and elite actors, ignoring local actors and female actors. While theories of educational expansion identify the impact of social movements in the U.S. and England, theoretical and empirical research has failed to test this outside the West. An overlooked movement concerned with expanding female education was the Woman’s Missionary Movement of the late 19th century. As part of the Protestant missionary movement, the largest movement of non-state modern actors in the world, it mobilized tens of thousands of female Protestant missionaries to extend female education in over 140 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America by the early 20th century. Drawing on the history of the movement, I demonstrate its similarity to 19th century expansion in the U.S. and England in terms of motivation, methods, and institutionalization mechanisms. In statistical analysis of mean female enrollments from 1950- 2010 in 76 non-Western countries, I find that the number of female Protestant missionaries and the years of exposure to Protestant missions predict higher female primary enrollments, net of 24 alternative explanatory measures and pre-WWII enrollment levels. I find that the number of missionary secondary schools and the years of exposure to Protestant missions predicts higher female secondary enrollments, net of 21 alternative explanatory measures and pre-WWII enrollment levels. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................. v LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................. vii Chapter 1 Modern Institutions and Missionary Methods .................................................... 1 Chapter 2 Problems with Prior Explanations of Female Educational Expansion ............... 5 Chapter 3 A Missing Mechanism: The Woman’s Missionary Movement ........................ 10 The Historical Milieu of the Woman’s Missionary Movement ............................ 11 Educational equality, socialization of children, and societal reform ..................... 12 Associational power and the advancement of “woman” ....................................... 14 Chapter 4 Mechanisms of Expansion and Institutionalization .......................................... 17 Diffusion of Education for Girls and Women ....................................................... 18 Legitimacy of female education ............................................................................ 19 Integration into mechanisms of reproduction ........................................................ 23 Chapter 5 Data and Methods ............................................................................................. 27 Dependent Variable ............................................................................................... 27 Female Protestant Missionary Variables ............................................................... 28 Control Variables ................................................................................................... 30 Chapter 6 Results ............................................................................................................... 35 Primary Enrollments .............................................................................................. 39 Secondary Enrollments .......................................................................................... 48 Robustness Checks ................................................................................................ 57 Chapter 7 Discussion ......................................................................................................... 61 In Comparison with Traditional Explanations ...................................................... 66 Chapter 8 Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 69 Appendix A: Correlation Matrix ....................................................................................... 71 Appendix B: Female Protestant Missionaries by Country ................................................ 73 References ......................................................................................................................... 76 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Mean Female Primary Enrollments, 1950-2010, by Female Protestant Missionaries, 1923 ............................................................................................... 38 Figure 2: Mean Female Secondary Enrollments, 1950-2010, by Female Protestant Missionaries, 1923 ............................................................................................... 39 vi LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Descriptive Statistics ..................................................................................... 34 Table 2: Female Protestant Missionaries by Country, 1923 ........................................ 36 Table 3: OLS Regression Predicting Female Primary Education, 1950-2010, with Robust Standard Errors ........................................................................................ 42 Table 4: OLS Regression Predicting Female Primary Education, 1950-2010, with Robust Standard Errors ........................................................................................ 46 Table 5: OLS Regression Predicting Female Secondary Education, 1950-2010, with Robust Standard Errors ................................................................................ 50 Table 6: OLS Regression Predicting Female Secondary Education, 1950-2010, with Robust Standard Errors ................................................................................ 54 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would not be possible were it not for the painstaking work of Harlan Beach and Charles Fahs to collect missionary data in the late 19th and early 20th century, and for Bob Woodberry’s work in digitizing the data for his dissertation and subsequent publications. I am grateful to my advisor, Roger Finke, for his encouragement to pursue this topic and to my committee for their advice and feedback. I am especially grateful to my wife Meagin for her untiring support and particular excitement about this project. Chapter 1 MoDern Institutions anD Missionary Methods How did modern institutions spread from the West to the rest of the world, and what does gender have to do with it? I examine this question with respect to a primary institution in modern society—education—and regarding a central concern of modern society—gender equality in education. Scholars have noted mass education’s central role in constituting the modern nation- state (Ramirez and Boli 1987), and gender egalitarianism and increased levels of education go hand-in-hand as societies modernize (Inglehart and Norris 2003). The expansion of mass education is marked by convergence towards gender parity with increasing levels of female education in nearly every society over the past 50 years (Bradley and Ramirez 1996; Cole and Geist 2018).1 Yet, much of this prior research overlooks two important sources of these changes. Traditional explanations of female education’s contemporary expansion2 tend to ignore both local actors and female actors. Instead, the focus remains on the top-down efforts of 1 Gender parity in primary and secondary is well established on average at the global level, and the number of countries with gender parity has risen to 62 as of 2015 (UNESCO 2015). That this establishment of gender parity is now assumed is evidenced by how some World Bank demographers have labeled gender parity as a “low standard” of success in education (Psaki, McCarthy, and Mensch 2017). 2 Models of educational expansion consider both the rate of expansion and between country differences in current levels of education. In this study, I consider between country 2 colonial governments, emerging nation-states, and the world polity or on the diffuse influence of universal cultural norms (Boli, Ramirez, and Meyer 1985). Moreover, most cross-national research focuses on the latter half of the 20th century, even though both the expansion of and demand for schools for girls were established throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America well before the first World War. In short, traditional explanations for the spread of female education pay little attention to its pre-WWII origins