Drudges, Shrews, and Unfit Mothers

Among the first Europeans to encounter and settle on the southeastern coast of New Guinea, members of the London Missionary Society contributed a large corpus of publications concerning indigenous peoples from the mid-1870s until the rise of professional anthropology in the 1920s. While these works...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social sciences and missions
Main Author: Barker, John (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Brill 2018
In: Social sciences and missions
Further subjects:B Missionaries Papua New Guinea women
B Missionnaires Papouasie Nouvelle-Guinée femmes
Online Access: Volltext (Verlag)
Description
Summary:Among the first Europeans to encounter and settle on the southeastern coast of New Guinea, members of the London Missionary Society contributed a large corpus of publications concerning indigenous peoples from the mid-1870s until the rise of professional anthropology in the 1920s. While these works focus mainly on the activities and concerns of men, women provide a key index of “civilization” relative to the working British middle class from which most missionaries came. This essay provides a survey of the portrayal of women in this literature over three partly overlapping periods, demonstrating a shift from racialist to moral discourses on the status of Papuan women – a shift that reflects transitions in both missionary and anthropological assumptions during this period.
ISSN:1874-8945
Contains:In: Social sciences and missions
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/18748945-03101008