Mather Center Research Salon with Professor Emeritus Miriam Levin

Protestant Women Missionaries and the Export of An American Culture of Progress: Doing History, Rethinking the Narrative

Dr. Levin's talk will begin by briefly discussing two topics that hover in the minds of historians as they conduct research. It will focus on her current book project described below. Thus, first "Doing Historical Research: Challenging Constructs with
apologies to "Law and Order" [the original]; and "The Autobiographical phantom", then her current book project. To whit:

Women's access to education has become one touchstone of democracy across the globe. To mention the most recent example: One of the first accusations against the Taliban's extremism was forbidding women to go to school. Women's ability to fully participate in the life of their societies is now precariously embedded in support for schools, colleges and universities, preparation for jobs and professions by the United Nations, numerous NGOS, and many governments. No country has made women's education a platform of its foreign policy more than the United States over the past fifty years. But support is not equality. Women have had to face and to be reckoned with within the construct of a globalizing world of capitalist economic,
social and political structures designed by men, including missionary boards. The origins and features of women's efforts to join the forces of modernity in the world through schools, seminaries, and colleges lie in the history of American Protestant foreign missionary societies during the 19th and early 20th centuries as leaders of these organizations took their cue from burgeoning American international trade and manufacturing. Especially in the mainstream liberal societies that viewed women as useful but problematic, women were to some extent able to define roles for themselves as agents of change through female education that prepared women for work, to earn money, and gave them some purchase as participants in the secular, modernizing trends taking place in their countries.

Dr. Levin's book challenges feminist historians' narrative focused on missionaries educating native women for home making and family, perpetuating the American ideology of domesticity. Most centrally, it places individual monographs on foreign women's colleges within the context of mission boards' agendas for higher education led by men to implant an American culture of progress abroad.

All salons are arranged and generously sponsored by the Community Advisory Board of the Flora Stone Mather Center for Women at CWRU.

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