Containment and control: presbyterian women and the missionary impulse in New South Wales, 1891-1914

Abstract

This paper focuses on attempts by middle-class, conservative women to maintain control over their sphere of public action. The women had organised in order to support Presbyterian women missionaries. Presbyterian women in the state of New South Wales, Australia, like other church women throughout the world, eagerly supported their mission sisters. The experiences of these women reveal the means by which women were contained and controlled. Both women missionaries and their supporters believed in a conservative, Christian, domestic ideology. However, single women missionaries were able to use that ideology as a means of personal escape from its confines. For their supporters at home, women missionaries came to represent an exciting and purposeful lifestyle. The support the Presbyterian women offered to missionaries can be recounted, in its own terms, as a celebratory narrative. An alternative reading is that the women's very success doomed their efforts at independent, sisterly support of women missionary employees.

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