The American foreign mission movement was spawned in New England during the early years of the nineteenth century, in the ferment of the second great awakening. This outburst of evangelical energy and nationalist zeal was harnessed in service of a global agenda, which would be realized in part through the efforts of women. In my thesis, I explore the various convergences of home, nation, and Protestant mission in the journal-letters of three missionary women of the first half of the century--Harriet Newell, Caroline Pilsbury, and Narcissa Whitman. In a time when empire was driven by moral as much as territorial imperatives, these women were transformed into agents of imperial domesticity, expected to convert the world's "heathen" through the power of sheer feminine influence. Through letter writing, they negotiated these expectations before an emerging evangelical reading public, revealing in their texts the complex, and often-contradictory, discourses that shaped their sense of mission in an era of American expansion.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:TCU/oai:etd.tcu.edu:etd-04142011-132415
Date14 April 2011
CreatorsSchat, Aleisa Rose
ContributorsTheresa Strouth Gaul
PublisherTexas Christian University
Source SetsTexas Christian University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf, application/msword
Sourcehttp://etd.tcu.edu/etdfiles/available/etd-04142011-132415/
Rightsunrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to TCU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

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