Thesis
Emissaries for the Lord: American Protestant women writers and missionaries, 1930s
Washington State University
Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
2017
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/100248
Abstract
This thesis argues that American Protestant women, though not ordained preachers, nevertheless actively engaged in ongoing discussions in the twentieth century about the justification for the continuance of the foreign mission enterprise. Analyzing organizational newsletters from the Young Woman's Christian Association (YWCA), American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), Pentecostal Christ's Ambassadors, and the Assemblies of God highlights the rhetoric and writing forms that religious women used to promote their ideas about women's roles, foreign peoples, and pluralism versus evangelism during the 1930s. This written material produce by women missionaries reflects changes in gender during the twentieth-century. Moreover, articles written by women in the newsletters demonstrate how women used changes in gender norms, or conversely the stasis, to navigate religious leadership and the establishment of foreign missions. The foreign mission movement, the split between liberal and fundamentalist Protestantism, and women's participation in these discussions has been understudied due not only to women's unequal access to theological leadership but also the presumption that the foreign mission movement died out by the turn of the twentieth century. This thesis, however, aims to rectify the oversimplification of women's roles in changes in American Protestantism and foreign missions during the 1930s by studying laywomen's writing forms published in organizational newsletters, such as narratives, political articles, and discussions on the efficacy of foreign missions, and how American Protestants should relate to foreign peoples. These articles display the gendered forms of writing within religious newsletters during the 1930s.
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Details
- Title
- Emissaries for the Lord
- Creators
- Renee Ann Torres
- Contributors
- Jennifer Thigpen (Degree Supervisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- History, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University; [Pullman, Washington] :
- Identifiers
- 99900525143201842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis