Women on a Mission: African Methodist Episcopal Missionary Women, Gender and Race Relations, 1900-1940. Claire Cooke (20269401) BA (Hons), University of Western Australia, 2010 This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia School of Humanities (Gender Studies) 2014 ii Abstract Women on a Mission: African American Missionary Women, Gender and Race Relations, 1880–1940. In this thesis, I critically analyse how African American missionary women negotiated race and gender in South African missionary societies. The empirical material of this thesis is drawn from case studies of missionary women who were part of the African American denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), and its South African missionary societies. In recent decades, scholarship on mission women has burgeoned. Historians, missionary, and feminist scholars alike have applied varied methodologies to a wide range of contexts to study mission women’s experiences. Scholarship has also recently started to expand to the study of mission and convert women’s interactions. I draw on the emerging scholarship using an interdisciplinary approach to explore how AME women, especially, experienced mission work – whether born in the United States (US) or converted in the field. The timeframe is from 1900 to 1940, when the majority of US AME missionaries went to Africa. Relations between African Americans and white Americans in the US deteriorated at the end of the nineteenth century but this decline coincided with the expansion of AME missionary work. This missionary work provided US AME women with increased agency, which was denied to them at home. This thesis explores the power and agency that AME women had within both the US and South Africa, and asks how African American AME missionary women negotiated gender ideologies and practices in South Africa, how they interacted with African women, and how they negotiated the regulation of their sexuality and sexual behaviour in South Africa. These questions are explored through the overarching themes of power and agency in colonial hierarchies. I begin by outlining the opportunities women could access in the mission field before a more nuanced discussion on the power relations cultivated between US and convert AME women. The ideas of US AME women providing maternal guidance to ‘forlorn’ convert women dominate surviving accounts. One US iii AME mission woman went a step further and attempted to introduce ideas of Western femininity to female African students at a South African mission school. In the middle chapters I explore women who worked without their husbands and, in doing so, garnered power denied in the US to AME women, although in one instance there was a strong backlash. In Chapter Five how convert women not only assumed power that superseded that of mission women, but also managed to avoid any form of criticism is explored. Tentative conclusions suggest that holding positions of power was not always without question or hindrance and depended on personal agendas and existing kinship networks. All of these factors appear to have impacted the women studied in nuanced ways. The final chapter of the thesis captures the gendered and racial divides AME women negotiated through discussion of the regulation of sexuality and sexual behaviour. Although US AME women were preoccupied with the discontinuation of African coming-of-age rituals and polygamous marriage practices, silence surrounds the sexual scandal of a male AME Bishop that challenged the very core of the AME doctrine. This distinction between permissible AME male sexual behaviour and the close regulation of female sexual behaviour perhaps best epitomises the gendered access to power and agency discussed throughout the thesis. The mission field presented unprecedented opportunities for both African and US AME women, not without encountering racial and gendered double standards. iv Declaration The thesis is my own composition and was conducted by me during enrolment in the degree. All sources have been acknowledged and my contribution is clearly identified in the thesis. This thesis does not contain work that I have published, nor work under review for publication. v vi Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the unconditional love and support from my family and friends. I am forever grateful to each and every one of you. Many thanks also to Professor Jacqueline Van Gent for her generosity, advice, support, and feedback on the myriad of drafts during the course of my studies. I could not have asked for a better supervisor! Gareth Griffiths provided invaluable support during the early days of the project, feedback over the course of the journey, and shrewd advice about archives for which I am thankful. Van Ikin and Kieran Dolin were very helpful with navigating all the PhD paperwork. Thanks also to the Scholarships Office for kindly providing me with an Australian Postgraduate Award and travel grants over the years. I am deeply grateful for the UWA library staff, especially Anne Lim (Document Delivery) and Graeme Rymill (Research and Learning Support Officer) who consistently went above and beyond the call of duty to assist me. My thanks also to the staff and colleagues I met at the archives and libraries in the United States who made me feel very welcomed and provided excellent assistance. In no particular order: Rose Memorial Library, Drew University, New Jersey; Burke Theological Library, Columbia, New York; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York; Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University, Philadelphia; Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio; Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan; Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University; Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University, Atlanta; and the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard. Special thanks to Deborah L. Dandridge, Field Archivist, African American Collections at the University of Kansas, for arranging my visit to Chester and Lillie Owen’s home in July 2012. The Owen family generously welcomed me into their home and I truly appreciated the opportunity to look at the rare archival materials. vii viii Table of Contents Introduction 2 Chapter 1 27 Tipping the Scales of Power: AME Missionary Women and Positions of Power in the Missionary Field of South Africa Chapter 2 54 Helping the ‘Motherland’: AME Women and Gendered Perceptions of South Africa Chapter 3 82 Teaching Power? Luella White and Domesticity at Wilberforce Institute Chapter 4 104 Out of Sight and Out of Control? AME Missionary Women and Gendered Authority in South Africa Chapter 5 133 In a Class of Their Own: Female AME Converts and the Importance of Education Chapter 6 160 Engendering Doctrine? The Gendered Control of Sexuality and Sexual Behaviour in the Mission Field Conclusion 186 Appendix 191 Chronological Date List of South Africa’s Presiding US Bishops and Their Spouses Primary Sources 192 Bibliography 201 ix x 1 Introduction Returning Home? AME Missionary Work in South Africa, 1880–1940 In 1936, a large crowd gathered at one of the piers in New York City to farewell two African American missionaries bound for Cape Town, South Africa. The couple, Richard and Charlotte Wright, were farewelled with elaborate presents, which included orchids sent by President Franklin Roosevelt.1 The expensive farewell at the New York docks was incongruent with the economic realities of the Great Depression sweeping across the United States of America (US) at this time, but it encapsulated the doctrine of the religious denomination the two missionaries represented. Even impoverished areas of the city, such as Harlem, featured African Methodist Episcopal (AME) churches, with their plush red velvet-lined pews and gold-decorated furnishings. This was the opening act for AME missionaries. The departure of missionaries was not itself remarkable, as the denomination had farewelled couples every four years who were bound for its various mission fields.2 What was exceptional about the Wrights is that this couple would be single-handedly responsible for implementing some of the most drastic changes that the AME mission field in South Africa had ever seen. Furthermore, they would write prolifically about their time in South Africa and the series of events that occurred while they were there, leaving us with a wealth of information to explore. The second act, their arrival in Cape Town, was radically different to the scenes witnessed in New York: many of the missionaries were detained on board of their ships, as South Africa’s colonial government feared that the agenda of the AME would incite an indigenous uprising. It is this hostile greeting by local authorities that prefaces the third act of AME missionaries’ foray into the mission field, and it is also where my 1 Charlotte Crogman Wright, Beneath the Southern Cross: The Story of an American Bishop’s Wife in South Africa (New York: Exposition Press, 1955), 13. 2 The AME normally only sent one US couple to the South African mission field at any given time. A notable exception to this occurred in 1937 when Bishop Amos White and his wife Luella White were invited by the Presiding Bishop to run a mission school. South African converts typically filled the other positions, such as Reverend, and taught at the mission schools, with the bulk of the work undertaken in the Transvaal and Cape Town. Occasionally, US AME ministers visited the mission field to offer support to the Presiding Bishop for brief periods. The most comprehensive surviving primary source material pertains to the Presiding Bishops. For a complete list, see ibid., 60. 2 study of how mission women specifically negotiated the mission fields of South Africa begins. Origins and Structure of the African Methodist Episcopal Church The AME is a religious affiliation that was founded by free African Americans in Philadelphia in the 1790s.