'A looking-glass for ladies': American Protestant women and the Orient in the nineteenth century

Beliefs about Oriental women played a significant role in a movement that mobilized American Protestant women in behalf of foreign missions in the first half of the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century evangelicals used the term Orient to represent the area of the world stretching from Jerusalem to Beijing and encompassing a wide variety of religious cultures. American evangelicals collapsed their understanding of that region and their assumptions about the women who lived there into a unitary concept, the Oriental woman. They used popular missionary literature and official records of missions organizations to disseminate ideas about Oriental women as a way of mobilizing Americans in behalf of the cause of evangelizing Asia. The dramatic feminization of the foreign mission movement that occurred in the late nineteenth century with the formation of women's denominational mission boards reflected the influence of tropes about Oriental women that had circulated since early in the century.; Most scholars attribute the feminization of the foreign mission movement to the activism of Northern women in behalf of the Union effort in the Civil War. Their experiences supposedly gave those women the confidence that they needed to declare their independence from denominational boards and engage in the work of foreign missions on their own terms. In contrast, I argue that, motivated by a conception of the "plight" of Oriental women shaped by popular missionary literature in the form of memoirs, magazines, tracts, and children's books, women began founding national organizations to advance the cause of missions even before the war. After the war, women established mission boards in cooperation with male denominational leaders, not in opposition to them. Those leaders welcomed the women's efforts even as they expressed anxiety over both the financial arrangements that such an expansion of the work entailed and the shifting gender relations that it produced within the movement at home and abroad.