Island Queens and Mission Wives by Jennifer Thigpen

Author:Jennifer Thigpen [Thigpen, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781469614298
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2014-11-15T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5 Hawaiian Heroines

In December 1825, just over five and half years after the missionaries’ arrival in the islands, Ka‘ahumanu took communion in the Kawaiaha‘o Church in Honolulu. Mercy Partridge Whitney was among those in attendance at the service; afterward, she eagerly reported that Ka‘ahumanu—along with seven other Hawaiians—had “united with the church.” Moreover, she recalled, “they all received an English name in addition to their native one, in the ordinance of baptism.” On that day, Ka‘ahumanu became, to the missionaries, Elizabeth Ka’ahumanu.1 Though American missionaries were cautious when it came to conversions—having, as Hiram Bingham put it, “no faith in baptismal regeneration”—they believed this one to be genuine.2 Mercy Whitney, for example, vouched for the depth of the queen’s conversion when she observed just a few weeks later that the royal woman behaved “like a mother to us all.” The metaphor was a common one: from the mission’s earliest days, missionaries and their wives described their hope that ali‘i would become like “mothers and fathers” to the mission. Yet the results among Hawai‘i’s high-ranking men had been disappointing. In contrast, as Mercy Whitney reported, Ka‘ahumanu “endeared herself” to the missionaries not only “by her attachment to the mission” but also by “her consistent walk and conversation as a Christian.”3

Despite a disappointing and sometimes trying first year in Hawai‘i, the years thereafter proved somewhat more productive. By 1825 the missionaries had made what they considered to be a few key conversions, most notably among Hawaiian women of rank. The missionaries were deeply gratified by these successes and seized upon ranking women’s dramatic and highly symbolic activities in the 1820s to produce stories heralding their successful conversions. Mission writers circulated those narratives to a reading—and donating—public in America. The literature they produced had dual effects. First, it highlighted Hawaiian women’s role in the Christianization of the Hawaiian Islands by illustrating their transformation from “savage heathen” to “civilized” Christian women. By the middle part of the nineteenth century, published stories that centered on the successful conversion of Hawai‘i’s high-ranking women—lauded as “heroines” to their people—abounded and were held up as proof of the spread of Christianity and civilization in Hawai‘i, as well as, not incidentally, of the efficacy of the missionaries’ work on behalf of the Hawaiian people.4 In a second and related way, the conversion literature suggested, sometimes quite overtly, a new space for white women in the American foreign-mission movement. Where the ABCFM originally envisioned that women would serve the mission as “helpmeets”—that is, as wives and mothers—the missionary experience in Hawai‘i demonstrated the much larger and more vital role that American women might play in the conversion of the world’s “heathen.”5

This chapter explores the conversion narratives that mission and other writers produced in the period spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the early years of the twentieth to reveal the increasingly gendered nature of Christian conversion in the Hawaiian Islands. The narratives generated in this period measured a female convert’s piety not solely by her willingness or desire to

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