Missionary Manhood: Professionalism, Belief and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century British Imperial Field

摘要

It is almost a truism now that the understanding of the work and impact of western missions was incomplete without an analysis of the role of the 'peri-professional' women - sisters, wives and daughters - who laboured alongside the male missionary, both prior to and throughout the advent of the professional female mission worker. But what of the importance of the Christian husband and father? The juxtaposition of professional and private that similarly existed for the male missionary has been less well studied by mission historians. Andrew Porter's early writing examined the relationship between personal belief and student evangelical activism in shaping individual professionals and colonial policy. Much of his subsequent work similarly rests on expectations about the importance of that interplay between private belief and practice and a public life although the focus of much of his writing has been on the formal public life. This paper focuses a gendered lens on the modern male mission professional; in doing so it argues that faith, in addition to secular markers of identity, must be considered in order to fully understand nineteenth-century masculine constructions, in both domestic and imperial British society.