Women’s Civilizing Mission and Globalization in the Pacific

My paper examines American women’s civilizing mission, and prevailing U.S. gender system and women’s social activism in the Pacific between 1820 and 1939. It focuses on Hawaii, and Japanese who became the largest ethnic group in the islands, at the time when the compelling force of modernization, Westernization, and Americanization engulfed the Pacific. Hawaii constituted the gender frontier of the West and the East, as well as White and People of Color, involving men and women of various racial, national, and cultural backgrounds.

Noticeably, American churchwomen from New England as well as their descendents in Hawai‘i took longer than their mainland counterparts in liberating themselves from the “cult womanhood” and moving out of women’s separate sphere, in the face of politically active Native Hawaiian women. Rather than challenging their male-dominant gender system upfront, they endeavored to create and to expand women’s autonomous space in it by promoting “woman’s work for women and children.” After the overthrow, they pursued republican motherhood in an attempt of bringing plastic minds of island children, who came to include a large number of those of Asian ancestry, under their maternalisitic, American, and Christian influence. Assisting their efforts were Asian native protégés of American missionaries who engaged in their evangelical civilizing missions in immigrants’ homelands. After World War I, when Hawaii and the Pacific faced the rising tide of internationalism as well as the volatile race and national relations, Hawaii’s elite white women endeavored to collaborate with women elite of Pacific nations in promoting friendly exchange among them.

By illuminating the unequal relationships that provided the theater for women’s endeavors to “uplift” the Pacific, my paper discusses how globalization in the Pacific was contested and negotiated among multiple men and women of various national, racial, and socio-cultural backgrounds.