“Prayerless Mother! Spare, Oh Spare Your Child”: Missionaries, Heathens, and the Maternal Ideal in the Early American Republic

This paper examines how non-Protestant, foreign women became associated with “unnatural motherhood” in the American popular imagination in the early nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, poor, unmarried women of all backgrounds were vulnerable to accusations of infanticide and child harm. But from the 1810s onward, ethnicity, religion, and nationality began to replace marital status in popular assessments of maternal fitness. Single, white women who may have once aroused suspicion were often recast as “victims” – of circumstance, seduction, and misunderstanding – and popular print culture began to turn elsewhere for evidence of monstrous motherhood. At this same time, the first American-led missions embarked to Asia, the Sandwich Islands, and the Middle East. While conversion and acculturation may have been the primary stated goals of missionaries and reformers, it was the unchristian family – crystallized in the symbol of the uncaring, profligate, and harmful heathen mother – that came to represent American anxiety over religious, ethnic, and gender difference. For American readers, the foreign, unchristian mother allowed for continued exploration of the transgressive female behavior it had long found both unsettling and compelling, while also creating the illusion that it had little place in mainstream white society. Paradoxically, the public could also read laudatory accounts of missionary wives, whose intensive work abroad ministering to women and children often interfered with their own maternal duties. Both the unchristian mother and the missionary wife were antithetical to the idealized version of domestic motherhood that pervaded the American imagination – yet it was foreign women who overwhelmingly came to represent maternal perversion. By examining how the foreign mother became designated “unnatural” – and in relation to her missionary counterpart – this paper seeks to more fully understand the tensions surrounding gender roles, family life, imperialism, and nationality in the early American republic.