Abstract
This study focuses on the women of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), which, in 1868, created independent women’s boards, giving generations of college-educated women the opportunity to travel freely around the world. Because they were recruited from liberal arts colleges to teach, they began with an agenda that was different and often in opposition to the male missionaries whose directive was to convert through preaching. Here, I will present three national case studies—Japan, Ottoman Turkey, and India—focusing on the networks of communication that kept them abreast of the educational work around the world and supported them through times of political turmoil and marginalization. The transnational aspect of the missionary endeavor is about the international network of communication the women created and relied upon in the form of private correspondence and public magazines and journals while serving in remote and often politically hostile locations.
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Wollons, R. (2020). Writing Home to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions: Missionary Women Abroad Narrate Their Precarious Worlds, 1869–1915. In: Mayer, C., Arredondo, A. (eds) Women, Power Relations, and Education in a Transnational World . Global Histories of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44935-3_5
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