“We Must Do What We Can … to Prepare Men in This Post to Be Efficient Workers in This Part of the Lord's Vineyard”: Black Women’s Religious Negotiation of Gendered Exclusion in 1860s Haiti

This paper examines the activities of a Port-au-Prince Episcopal Church congregation founded in the 1860s by a Black American emigrant to Haiti, Reverend (and eventually Bishop) James Theodore Holly. By examining the actions of women in his congregation, both U.S.- and Haitian-born, this paper considers the gendered barriers that Black women encountered in emigration movements. By addressing how women in the Haitian capital aligned with this congregation instituted innovative mutual aid projects through their religious activities, this paper chronicles how they negotiated, refused, and circumvented such barriers. This paper also considers the ways in which Holly’s missionary activities in Haiti evidence how emigration movements at times facilitated social hierarchies based on gender or place of origin rather than racial identity, the organizing logic which most emigrants sought to escape by migrating.