'To Save the Girls for Brighter and Better Lives': Presbyterian Missions and Women in theSouth of...

8/3/2019 'To Save the Girls for Brighter and Better Lives': Presbyterian Missions and Women in theSouth of Vanuatu

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The Journal of Pacific History Inc

'To Save the Girls for Brighter and Better Lives': Presbyterian Missions and Women in theSouth of Vanuatu: 1848-1870Author(s): Margaret JollySource: The Journal of Pacific History, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Jun., 1991), pp. 27-48Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25169050 .Accessed: 04/09/2011 01:19

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To Save theGirls for Brighter and Better Lives7PresbyterianMissions and Women in theSouth of Vanuatu: 1848-1870*

MARGARET JOLLYIT HAS OFTEN BEEN ARGUED IN RELATION TO THE PROJECTS OF DEVELOPMENT AGENcies in post-colonial states that the effect of European capitalist expansion hasbeen the 'domestication' of women. What I examine here is the claim earlier

made by Boserup and Leacock that this is but the latest phase in a long processbeginning early in the colonial period.1 In the Pacific, Christian missions werecrucial agents in the process of Western colonisation and many were zealouslydedicated to the 'domestication' of indigenous women.2 Promoting novelmodels of women's domesticity was often part of broader missionary projectsfor salvation and conversion. But quite how far such projects accomplished theiraims bears closer study ? in terms of the missionaries' cultural background, theimpediments to the realisation of Christian family life in the colonies, and the

degrees to which local women adopted, transformed or resisted attempts to'domesticate' them.Here I examine interactions between Presbyterian missionaries and indigenous women in three southern islands of Vanuatu ? Aneityum and Aniwa, and

one region of Tanna ? from 1848 to 18 70. The study is tightly circumscribed bytime and place, but the processes considered are far more general. There isnow a

This paper is based on an earlier one, delivered to seminars at the Universities of Essex, Sydney,Macquarie, La Trobe and the Australian National University. I am grateful to participants in those seminars forcriticism and comments. To Helen Kavapalu a special thanks for research assistance in working through thePresbyterian mission journals, which are dealt with

morefully inmy forthcoming book, Engendering

Colonialism:Women and History in Vanuatu, than was possible here. My thanks to Macquarie University, the AustralianResearch Council, and the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, AustralianNational University, for support of my ongoing work. Vanuatu is the name assumed at independence in 1980for the islands known in the colonial period as the New Hebrides.

i See Barbara Rogers, The Domestication ofWomen; Discrimination inDeveloping Societies (London 1980); EstherBoserup, Women's Rote in Economic Development (London 1970) and Eleanor Leacock, 'Montagnais women andthe Jesuit program for colonization', inM. Etienne and E. Leacock (eds), Women and Colonization: AnthropologicalPerspectives (New York 1980), 25-42.1 here query the view that we can see the impact of capitalist expansion onwomen in terms of a simple model of domestication. The missionary model was accepted only in part and wasopposed by contrary colonial forces which brought women into paid work ? as indentured or wage labourerson plantations, as domestic servants, and later teachers, nurses and office workers.2Colonialism I take to include the complex process of foreign cultural intrusion, and not just the formalannexation of

territory bya

metropolitan power.This formal aspect of colonial rule is but one aspect of a

colonizing process inwhicn missionaries, traders and other settlers are of equal ifnot greater consequence thancolonial officials.

2 7 The ournal f PacificHistory, 26:1 {1991 ).


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28 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORY

burgeoning literature on missionary projects in the Pacific3 and on the impact ofmissionaries on women in various colonial situations.4 The texts of missionariesare rich sources for writing colonial history, and especially for the unwrittencolonial history of changing gender relations. Elsewhere Martha Macintyre and Ihave argued for the crucial role of Christian missions in colonisation throughoutthe Pacific, and in particular transformations of domestic life, often renderedeternal by anthropologists and historians alike.5 What still eludes us however is asense of the interaction between missionary and local projects and in particularthe relation of European women and indigenous women in this process.

Diane Langmore for example discusses the 'object lesson of a civilized Christian home' in the work of four missions operating in Papua from 1874 to 1914.She distinguishes domestic conjugality from celibate communality in the promotion of this ideaL The London Missionary Society (LMS) and Methodists laidgreat stress on the missionary couple and the family abode as amodel home forlocal people. Protestant missionary men had perforce to find themselves a suitable partner for wives were considered crucial to the work of their husbands andin creating a comfortable and ordered home. Such ideals were regularly compromised by the realities of Ufe in Papua ? the unpredictability of supplies inremote regions, the effects of tropical climate on precious furnishings, long separations from older children absent at school and most appalling, the toll ofsickness and death amongst infants especially. But women such as Fanny Lawesand Lily Bromilow were not just seen as devoted wives to their husbands but asmothers to the mission itself.6

By contrast, Catholics and high Anglicans pursuing celibate ideals afforded amodel not of the isolated nuclear family but of Christian community. The mission stations of the Sacred Heart were typically less cosy, being made of bushs See James A. Boutilier, Daniel T. Hughes and Sharon W. Tiffany (eds), Mission, Church and Sect in Oceania,ASAO Monograph no. 6 (Ann Arbor 1978); Niel Gunson, Messengers ofGrace: Evangelical Missionaries in the SouthSeas, 1797-1860 (Melbourne 1978); David Hilliard, God's Gentlemen: A History of theMelanesian Mission 1849-1942(St Lucia 1978); Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre (eds), Family and Gender in thePacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact (Cambridge 1989); Diane Langmore, 'A neglected force: white women missionaries in Papua, 1874-1914', Journal ofPacific History, 17 (1982), 138-57; idem, Missionary Lives: Papua, 1874-1914,Pacific Islands Monograph Series, no. 6 (Honolulu 1989); idem, The object lesson of a civilized Christianhome', inJolly and Macintyre, Family and Gender, 84-107; David Wetherell, Reluctant Mission: The Anglican Churchin Papua New Guinea (St Lucia 1977).4 See, e.g., Christine Ward Gailey, 'Putting down sisters and wives: Tongan women and colonization', inEtienne and Leacock, Women and Colonization, 294-322; Patricia Grimshaw, 'Christian woman, pious wife,faithful mother, devoted missionary: conflicts in roles of American missionary women in nineteenth centuryHawaii', Feminist Studies, 9 (1983), 489-522; idem, 'New England missionary wives, Hawaiian women and "thecult of true womanhood" *, in Jolly and Macintyre, Famuy and Gender, 19-44; idem, Paths of Duty: American

Missionary Wives in Early Nineteenth Century Hawaii (Honolulu 1989); Annette Hamilton, 'Bond-slaves of Satan:Aboriginal women and the missionary dilemma', in Jolly and Macintyre, Family and Gender, 236-58; ToniScanlon, ' "Pure and clean and true to Christ'*: black women and white missionaries in the north', Hecate, 12

(1-2) (1986), 83-105; Nancy Pollock, The early development of housekeeping and imports in Fiji', PacificStudies, 12(2) (Mar. 1989), 53-82.5 See, e.g., Ron Adams/Homo anthropolopcus and man Tanna: Jean Guiart and the anthropological attemptto understand the Tannese', Journal ofPacific History, 22 ( 198 7 ), 3-14. For a critique of treating the domestic aseternal see Jolly and Macintyre, Family and Gender, Iff.6 See Langmore, Missionary Lives, 65-82.


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TO SAVE THE GIRLS FOR BRIGHTER AND BETTER LIVES 29

materials rather than timber and iron, and without comfortable furnishings andaesthetic decorations. There, as in the marginally less austere mission stations ofthe Anglicans, great stress was placed on communal commensality and self sufficiency.

Communalliving quarters

anddining

rooms were usual and onmanymissions vegetable gardens were cultivated and farm animals domesticated. Inthe SHM stations there was a particular stress on self reliance through crafts ?saw mills, carpentry shops, forges and tanneries. But for both Catholics and

Anglicans the mission community was an alternative, even preferable, model ofthe family, the broader family of the Church. In the words of Archbishop Navarre, itwas the celibate orders which had 'given the world the true idea of theChristian home'.7 But celibate communes asmuch as Protestant couples revealedwhat this true idea of home meant for missionary women. Though sisters ratherthan wives, women in Catholic and Anglican communities were also auxiliaries,albeit slightly more separate and autonomous ones.8

Langmore's account of Missionary Lives in Papua from 1874 to 1914 ismeticulous and sensitive, but is expressly limited to the 'object lesson' provided bythe missionaries and does not address the responses to this lesson by 'the hostpeoples'.9 But it is possible to discern local responses from the European missionary accounts and even to catch glimpses of the relations between European

missionary women and local women.The empirical scope of this essay is far more modest than Langmore's ? beingconcerned with Presbyterian missions in three small islands at an earlier period.By focusing the study on the first generation of European missionaries in Vanuatu we can appreciate the stark differences between idealised projects importedfrom Europe and their practical realisation in the colonies, between missionaryrhetoric and daily experience.This is a study of European missionaries and not of missionary effort in general The early efforts to establish Christian missions in Vanuatu, as in Papua,New Guinea and the Solomons, relied largely on other 'South Sea islanders' ? inparticular men and women from Samoa, the Cook Islands, Rarotonga and theLoyalty Islands.10 About 50 of these Polynesian men and women died in the7 Ibid, 82.8 See ibid, 82-8, 163-84; Langmore, 4Aneglected force', 142, 156.9 Langmore, Missionary Lives, xviii.ioThe very first attempts at establishing Christian missions inVanuatu were organised through the LMS ?by John Williams, George Turner and Henry Nisbet. Their presence was short lived ? Williams was killed onarrival at Erromanga in 1839, and Turner and Nisbet and their wives spent only a few months on Tanna in1842-43 before abandoning it in the face of severe opposition. Samoans and Rarotongans were landed atTanna in 1845, but encountered resistance and moved to Aneityum, from where for some years they tried toregain a foothold on Tanna. This was hampered not only by Ta?mese hostility but by disease, including malariaand an epidemic of smallpox in 1852. Samoan teachers and Erromangan men trained in Samoa had also tried toestablish themselves on Erromanga, Efate and Aniwa. Island teachers, as elsewhere inMelanesia, were thevanguard

of Christian efforts and as such suffered incomparable problems? of sickness, demoralisation andloss of life. See J. Graham Miller, Live: aHistory of Church Planting in theNew Hebrides to 1880, Book One (Sydney1975), 24, 36-7,40. See also G. S. Parsonson, 'Early Protestant Missions in the New Hebrides, 1839-1861', MAthesis, University of Otago (Dunedin 1941 )and M. H. Campbell, 'A century of Presbyterian Mission educationin the New Hebrides', MEd thesis, University of Melbourne (Melbourne 1976).


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30 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORYmission stations in the south of Vanuatu before 1856. I do not consider thePolynesian missionaries here, not to diminish their crucial significance butbecause I am expressly considering European-indigenous relations in the missionising process.Although the LMS missionaries George Turner and Henry Nisbet were accompanied by their wives in an unsuccessful attempt to establish a mission onTanna in 1842-43, itwas not until the arrival of Presbyterian missionaries after1848 that the specific contributions of missionary women were highlighted.These missionaries were all associated with the various Presbyterian churches ?the Relief Church, the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland and thePresbyterian Church of Nova Scotia (which took over from the United SecessionChurch of Scotland). We will especially consider three famous couples ?Jessieand John Inglis, Charlotte and John Geddie, and Margaret Whitecross Paton andher husband John. Other missionaries were working in the southern and centralislands in this early period, the ill-fated Johnstons, Gordons, and Mathesons, aswell as Thomas Powell and Joseph Copeland.11 But these three couples are distinctive in having long and relatively successful sojourns and in producingvoluminous accounts of their experiences in journals, letters and later narratives.The Geddies were resident on Aneityum from 1848 to 1872, the Inglises on

Aneityum from 1852 to 18 79, and Paton on Tanna from 1858 to 1862 (where hisfirst wife Mary died in 1859) and from 1866 to 1881 on Aniwa with his secondwife, Margaret.

My main sources for the writing of this history are the diaries, letters and lifestories of these three couples. The differences between the more programmatic,prosyletising genre of the public autobiography and published letters and themore intimate and practical reflections of the daily journal and private correspondence are particularly interesting ? public claims about mission success areoften at variance with the daily record of lived experience. Also of interest is thedifferent treatment of events in the writings of missionary women and theirhusbands. For both the Geddies and the Patons we have letters and journals fromboth husband and wife, and although they usually concur, there are sometimesdivergent views or emphases.12

h From the late 1860s, missionaries were sponsored by Presbyterian churches in Victoria (1866), NewSouth Wales ( 1868), New Zealand ( 1869), South Australia ( 1882) and Tasmania ( 1882). It should be noted thatthe missionaries themselves were often still from Scotland or Nova Scotia ? e.g. Paton, Cosh, Gordon, Wattand Milne. As Miller notes this 'loyal, Bible-based Reformed faith of the smaller branches of Scottish Presbyterianism left a definite mark on the character of the island church' (Live, 148), and no less on the Presbyterianchurches of Australia and New Zealand12These are not our onlv sources on this time and place. Space does not permit a full survey of relevantliterature but see e.g. Dorothy Shineberg, They Camefor Sandalwood: A Study of the Sandalwood Trade in the SouthWest Pacific, 1830-1865 (Melbourne 1967); observations by British naval officers, e.g. Capt. John Erskine,Journal of a Cruise Among the Islands of theWestern Pacific.. .in Her Majesty's Ship 'Havannah ' (London 1853); P. D.Vigors, 'Private journal of a four months cruise through some of the "South Sea Islands" and New Zealand inH.M.S. "Havannah" ',mf, Dept of Pacific and Southeast Asian History, Australian National University ( 1850);Julius L. Brcnd?cy, Jottings During the Cruise ofH.M.S. 'Cura?ao'Among theSouth Sea Islands in 1865 (London 1873);


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How did these European missionary women see the situation of indigenouswomen, and how did they try to change it? This is evoked clearly in the words ofCharlotte Geddie Harrington, commenting on the missionary work of hermother Charlotte Geddie,From the very beginning our dear lady's heart ached for the condition of thewomen, treated as beasts of burden by cruel men, without hope of self-respect,

degraded in the extreme. How she worked to gain their confidence and to save thegirls for brighter and better lives.13

Saving the girls for brighter and better Uves meant re-orienting patterns ofwork, changing domestic practices in relation to clothing, shelter and food, andreforming the farniUal relations of parents and children and husbands and wives.The history of this project is dense with contradictions ? contradictionsbetween European and local models, between European ideals and the reaUty ofEuropean domestic Ufe in the colonies, and between the aim of improvementand that of domestication which impUed marginaUsation and devaluation relative to men.

These missionary women were firmly convinced that women's Uves weremade brighter and better not just by becoming Christian but by wholeheartedlyembracing what has been called the 'cult of true womanhood'.14 Both in Britainand in North America, there was a radical shift in notions of family and femininity which accompanied capitalist

transformations inagriculture and

industry. On peasant farms and in artisanal industry, the household had been botha unit of production and consumption. But as agricultural estates consoUdatedand mills and factories developed in the urban centres, a new sp?t developedNorma McArthur, 'Population and prehistory: the late phase on Aneityum', PhD thesis, Australian NationalUniversity (Canberra 1974); Matthew Spriggs, 'Vegetable kingdoms: taro irrigation and Pacific prehistory',PhD thesis, Australian National University (Canberra 1981 ); idem, ' "A school in every district?": the culturalgeography of conversion on Aneityum, south Vanuatu', Journal ofPacific History, 20 (1985), 23-42. All of thisprovides context and some outside assessment of missionary efforts (though we must exercise particular carewith the claims and counterclaims of missionaries and sandalwood traders since they were often at loggerheads). There is little 20th century ethnography which illuminates these events. Although successive studies byHumphreys, Guiart, Brunton, Wilkinson, Lindstrom and Bonnemaison offer different viewpoints

on 20tncentury Tanna, few credit the extent of social transformation since themid-19th century, with the exception ofJean Guiart, Un Si?cle et Demi de Contacts Culturels ? Tanna, Nouvelles-H?brides, Publications de la Soci?t? desOc?anistes, no. 5 (Paris 1956); Ron Brunton, The origins of the John Frum Movement: a sociological explanation', inM. R. Allen (ed.), Vanuatu: Politics, Econom?a and Ritual in Island Melanesia (Sydney 1981), 357-78;Julia Wilkinson, 'A study of a political and religious division on Tanna, New Hebrides', PhD thesis, University ofCambridge (Cambridge 1976); Lamont Lindstrom, 'Achieving wisdom: knowledge and politics in Tanna',doctoral dissertation, University of California (Berkeley 1981); Joel Bonnemaison, La Derni?re ?le (Paris 1986);and Ron Adams, In the Land of Strangers: A Century of European Contact with Tanna, 1774-1874, Pacific Research

Monograph 9 (Canberra 1984). Bonnemaison weaves together a superb synthesis of oral and documentaryaccounts in his study, La Derni?re ?le. But in none of these accounts are women more than a passing reference.The dramatic transformations in the lives of women over the course of a century are not only notacknowledged but expressly elided, witness Adams's evocation of a 'private female sphere as both hidden andintact', *Homo anthropologicus\ 14. There are regrettably no recorded memories ana reflections on this earlymission period by women from these southern islands.is Charlotte Geddie, Letters of Charlotte Geddie and Charlotte Geddie Harrington (Truro, Canada 1908), 7,15. m See Grimshaw, 'New England missionary wives', 21-2; and idem, Paths ofDuty. See the superb study byLeonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850(London 1987).


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32 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORYbetween the worlds of paid employment and commerce and that of domesticwork and familial nurture. In urban middle class families in particular, suchseparate spheres were increasingly portrayed as two worlds inhabited by the twogenders

? men associated with thepublic world of work,

commerce and instrumental rationality, women with the private world of the home, compassion andemotional intimacy.15The idealised practice of separate spheres was, moreover, indissociable fromevangelical Protestantism. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall point to thecentrality of religion in constructing an image of bourgeois women as pure andpious. The middle class woman was to maintain 'a nursery of virtue', a holyhousehold against the ravages of commerce and corruption outside.16 Insofar asshe took part in public life, her mission should be one of social reform or compassionate philanthropy. Patricia Grimshaw notes the parallel prominence ofwomen in the 'second great awakening' and the social reform movements ofearly 19th century America ? in reforming slum dwellers, in temperance

movements, in rescuing prostitutes, and in freeing slaves. Similar sentimentsattracted middle class women from New England and New York State to moreexotic frontiers in Christian mission in Hawaii.17These historical transformations in Britain and North America also providethe essential background to the work of Presbyterians in Vanuatu. They were notmembers of the high bourgeoisie of Birmingham and Manchester, described byDavidoff and Hall, nor from families as wealthy as those from New Englandwhich sent missionaries to Hawaii, portrayed by Grirnshaw. They were typicallyfrom lower middle class backgrounds in Scotland and Canada, more marginal tothese new urban centres of capitalist industry and commerce. Though theseScottish Presbyterians had a rather more humble class origin and a differentconstruction of the relation between Church and State, family and public life,

they shared a view of the home as the ideal place for women. This was an idealnot available to the majority of working class and peasant women who perforcehad to work in factory or field for their families to survive. The devout middleclass perceived such strenuous physical work outside the home as not only fatalto femininity, but to religiosity and the capacity to run good Christian homes.

Wifely domesticity was thus basic to their ideal of Christian civilisation.These missionary women, like their husbands, came from farms or smalltowns in Scotland and Nova Scotia, and were typically the daughters of large anddevout families, comfortable, if not prosperous. Their fathers were either farmers or artisans, their mothers were typically employed solely at home maintaining households and looking after children. The missionary women were for the

15Davidoffand Hall, Family Fortunes, 149ff.16 Ibid., 76fT.i' Grimshaw, 'New England missionary wives', 21.


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period rather well educated, having developed reading and writing skills as wellas those crucial to domestic economy.Jessie Inglis was born in the uplands of Galloway, where her father was awell-known and prosperous farmer and a leading elder of the Reformed Presbyterian Church. She completed her primary education in small Scottish schools,and then went on to 'one of the best ladies schools inManchester'.18 Accordingto her husband, she left school at 14 'a precocious girl both physically and

mentally'19 and returned home to help her mother, Jane Martin, in bringing upthe younger children until her marriage nine years later in 1844. He opinedIt was for her an admirable training ? better than that found inmost boardingschools. She became a thorough expert in domestic economy, both theoretical andpractical. Itwas a family training that went far to fit her for the place she was calledto fill as a missionary's wife.20

This admirable training fitted her first for service with the mission to theMaoris in New Zealand and then after eight years (in 1852) in Vanuatu. Whileacknowledging that she too was strongly interested in theological issues and thespiritual work of mission, John Inglis suggests that her view was of herself first asa wife and next a missionary, 'her household duties were her first duties'.21Such a primary commitment to domesticity was also apparent in the lives ofCharlotte Geddie and both Mary and Margaret Paton. Charlotte Geddie camefrom an even more comfortable urban background inNova Scotia. She was thedaughter of Dr Alexander Macdonald, a physician from the town of Antigonish.Her husband John, though born in Banff in Scotland, had as a young boy migrated with his family to Pictou inNova Scotia. Partly due to the influence of hisdevout parents (his father was an elder in the church), John Geddie early vowedhimself to mission service. Despite his weak constitution, he prepared himselfconsistently for this vocation ? learning printing, building and plastering andelementary medicine from his father-in-law. Charlotte, since their marriage in1839, had been preparing herself in an equally appropriate way by being azealous homemaker. According to her daughter, she was, on her marriage at 17,equally ready to 'bury herself in the quiet duties of a country manse, or go afaroff to the heathen'22 where such 'quiet duties' might be imparted to heathen

women.We know less about Mary Ann Robson, who became Mary Paton. She was the

daughter of a 'well-known and highly esteemed gentleman' from Berwickshire.She too had a devout Presbyterian family background and an intellect cultivated

i?John Inglis, In theNew Hebrides: Reminiscences ofMissionary Life and Work, Especially on the Island ofAneityum,from 1850 till 1887 (London 1887), 262-3.19 Ibid, 263.20 Ibid21 Ibid22C Geddie, Letters, 14.


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by 'a superior education'.23 She died within a few months of arrival on Tanna,from 'ague and fever',24 diarrhoea and pneumonia, only days after giving birthto a baby son, who died a few weeks later.25 Writing after her death, John Inglisnoted that in the mere three months of her Ufe on Tanna she had 'coUected' aclass of eight women, whom she was teaching 'to sew and sing'.26 MargaretWhitecross Paton, John's second wife, is also portrayed as having, both throughfamily upbringing and personal conviction, a similar desire to educate localwomen in the joys of domesticity. She came from a 'good' family in Edinburghand again had the advantages of a 'female education' at school and in thefamily.27The class character of the Presbyterian missions is perhaps most clearlyevoked in the case of her famous husband John Gibson Paton. Although in hisautobiography he is prone to stress his impoverished origins from a cottarfamily, his father, though a peasant cultivating barley and oats and working ahandloom on the estate of a Scottish laird, was not desperately poor. He hadresources sufficient to refuse to become a waged labourer during the period ofagricultural consoUdations. During Paton's childhood he made a decent Uving inTorthorwald as a weaver, specialising in the manufacture of hosiery for localmerchants. Paton's family was well enough endowed for him to pursue his education at the Dumfries Academy and then the Free Normal Seminary.28 Aftersome time as a teacher he became a missionary to the poor in the slums of

Glasgow. Central to his work at Green Street mission was the promotion of thePresbyterian ideals of hard work, thrift and temperance, and the celebration offemale piety as crucial to a weU-regulated and holy family Ufe. Paton comparedhis mission inVanuatu with that he had already undertaken amongst the poorerclasses of Glasgow ? exp?citly comparing the darkness of heathenism to thebarbarism of poverty, misery and alcoholism in the slums around Green Street.29The darkness of the lot of poor working class women was also analogous to thatof women in the state of savagery and heathenism.

The iconography of darkness and Ught characterises Christian missions everywhere. The dominant trope of conversion was that of bringing the Ught toheathen darkness. These Presbyterian missionary women had no doubt thatthey were the agents of that iUumination, and in particular were bringing theUght to the benighted women of Aneityum and Aniwa. The darkness of their

23 See Adams, In the Land, 95.24This was presumably malaria which was in this period usually described in these terms. Her husband'sdescriptions of the periodic nature of the attacks suggest malaria rather than other diseases inducing a hightemperature.25John Gibson Paton, Missionary to theNew Hebrides. An Autobiography, James Paton, ed. (London 1889),129-30.26 Inglis, In theNew Hebrides, 262.27Margaret Whitecross Paton, Letters and Sketches from the New Hebrides, James Paton, ed. (London1894).28 Paton, Missionary, 27, 40ff. See also Adams, In the Land, 78-80.29 Ibid, 53ff.


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situation, as for working class women back home, was first of aU linked to thework they did. Their assessment of the indigenous situation of women as

'downtrodden', 'debased' or 'degraded' is intimately linked to the observationthatthey

did hard manual work outside the home, that theywere 'beasts of

burden'. The Presbyterian missionaries were not alone in such descriptions:Captain Cook had earher said of the men of Tanna,

these seem to exceU in the use of Arms, but do not seem to be fond of labour, theynever would put a hand to assist in any work we were carr(y)ing forward ... butwhat Ijudge most from is their mak(e)ing theWomen do the most laborious work,of them they make pack-horses. Ihave seen awoman carrying a large bundle on herback, or a Child on her back and a bundle under her arm and a feUow struting beforeher with nothing but a club, or a spear or some such like thing in his hand ... Icannot say the women are beauties but I think them handsome enough for themenand too handsome for the use that is made of them.30

Whereas for Cook this was amatter of distant adjudication and idle outrage,for the early Protestant missionaries itwas cause for intervention.There is no doubt that women, particularly in th? southern islands ofAneityum, Aniwa and Tanna, worked extremely hard ? especiaUy in the workof cultivating taro.31 For instance on Aneityum taro was cultivated in both dryfields and irrigated plots and women did most of the work of planting, weedingand harvest. Women also gathered shellfish, and fed domestic pigs. They regularly carried enormous loads of tubers, bush products, wood, water and children.They did most of the cooking, wove mats for clothing and sleeping, and madethatch for houses. They, with the help of older siblings, were the main nurturersof children. On Aneityum men were not idle. They cultivated yams, grown infewer numbers as a prestige crop, and also constructed and irrigated taro terraces. They hoUowed out canoes and went deep sea fishing. They cut timber forand constructed the frames of houses.32 They did some cooking and hauling ofwood and water. They also carried and nurtured children on occasion. Butwomen did a disproportionate share of aUwork. Matthew Spriggs argues that inthis period on Aneityum women were exploited since men appropriated the

products of their labours ? tubers and pigs ? and circulated them in competitive feasts with other men ? an activity which accrued value to men asprestige.33But itwas not this fact which led to the Presbyterian view that women's workwas 'degraded'. There is throughout this missionary Uterature a presumptionthat manual or physical work, especiaUy in the taro fields or beyond the home,was in itself degrading to women. Paton observed for Tanna

soJames

CBeaglehole (ed.),

TheJournals of Captain JamesCook onHis Voyages ofDiscovery,

Vol. II(Cambridge1967), 504-5.si Spriggs, 'Vegetable kinedoms', 30-3.32 Inglis, In theNew Hebrides, 24.ss Spriggs, 'Vegetable kingdoms', 33ff.


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36 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORYIused to explain to them that thiswas how Christians helped and treated their wivesand sisters, and then they loved their husbands and were strong to work at home;and that as men were made stronger, they were intended t? bear the heavier burdens, and especially in all labours out of doors.34

This was a presumption which was dear to the hearts of Europeans of this classand period, but it was a foreign cultural value for ni-Vanuatu. There ismuchevidence that physical strength and work capacity 'out of doors' were in the pastand continue to be important attributes for both women and men inVanuatu. Soit is doubtful that Aneityumese, Aniwan or Tannese women came to share theview of themselves as 'beasts of burden' because they were hard at work cultivating crops, herding pigs, fishing, and carrying heavy loads of firewood and

water.

There is abundant evidence that missionaries and in particular missionarywomen tried to redirect women's energies away from work outside the home towork within it, and from raising taro to raising children. As inmany parts of theworld, these Presbyterian missions instituted special schools to train women indomestic work in the European way.35 Wherever missionary wives were longestablished they set up schools whose main purpose was to instruct women indomestic skills, especially in the sewing, laundry, ironing and starching ofclothes. The routines established by Charlotte Geddie in her boarding school forgirls on Aneityum were typical:

On Monday they wash ? on Tuesday starch, fold and beetle36 the plain clothes. OnWednesday they iron. You would be surprised to see how well they do the clothes.They make and bake the bread, sweep, dress the children, etc. etc. Some of them cansew very neady; but the younger ones know little about it, as we have been very longout of materials.37

Her letters back home to Nova Scotia made constant pleas for materials to besent, in preference to finished clothing. Her intention seems to have been notonly to transform indigenous attire which she saw as indecent but to encouragethe industry of local women. This is obvious in her letter to Mrs Waddell on16 September 1851, where she laments the small quantity of patchwork whichcame in boxes of clothing despatched from Nova Scotia. She was regretfullyobliged to divide it 'into very small pieces to keep the girls busy'.38 Elsewhere shewrites 'Tell your little girls to save all their little pieces for their little dark sistersout here, who can make nice little garments for themselves'.39 When unmade

s* Pat?n, Missionary, VoL I, 158.35Compare Grimshaw, 'New England missionary wives', 35ff.; Gailey, 'Putting down*, 314, and Langmore,Missionary Lives, 165.36 'Beetle*, a rather uncommon ifnot archaic word, refers to the process of flattening clothes with amalletprior to ironing them.37C Geddie, Letters, 29.3? Ibid, 26.39 Ibid., 36. This is quite symptomatic of the infantilising language common in descriptions of indigenouswomen. But itmay also reflect the tendency to proliferate diminutives in the language of those with Scotsancestry. For the Latter observation I am grateful toWendy Cowling.


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38 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORYanything but tobacco for work, but now they will find it for their own interest to paythem in clothing.43

This is probably inflated missionary rhetoric since desire for cloth precededmissionary efforts. Dorothy Shineberg reports that from the middle of 1848there was at Paddon's sandalwood stations and beach outlets a sharp upturn inthe demand for drapery ? calico, blankets, twill and the old favourites scarletcomforters and caps. This may have been because the demand for iron and otherhardware had been satiated and because cloth was a prestige good before itbecame a necessity for Christian converts.44 From 1849 tobacco quickly supplanted cloth as the major item of trade in all the islands except Aneityum ?testimony to the fact that here mission influence was unusually successful ? inencouraging clothing and in banning tobacco.

Meanwhile on the other side of Aneityum Jessie Inglis was using this desire forcloth as an incentive for the cultivation of arrowroot. It grew wild on Aneityum,but she introduced a technique for itsmanufacture. Arrowroot had been madein mission establishments in Polynesia, and she learnt from a Rarotonganwoman how to do it.Her preferred method was not the more sloppy style of theLMS where the bulb was merely washed and the unpeeled root grated, but amore labour-intensive technique which involved washing, scraping the skin,washing the root again, then grating it and straining the arrowroot through finecloth. This elaborate

procedure (allwomen's work) produced

a pure whitearrowroot which was then sold to consumers in England, Canada and Australiafor one shilling a pound.45 Advertisements in Presbyterian journals stress thepurity and whiteness, and the apparently associated fact that itwas made only byChristian natives. Through this trade, the Aneityumese accumulated moneywhich was used to buy clothing and later, when the Bible, catechisms andhymnals were no longer distributed free, to buy them.On the basis of such Presbyterian experience, Robert Steel writing a defence ofthe mission some years later justified the introduction of clothing as an incentiveto trade. He saw the introduction of clothing as stimulating people to dispose oflocal food and produce, and also as the impetus for the import of other Britishmanufactures. 'They want because they wear clothing.'46 He claimed that a tradein useful articles distinguished the Christian islands, whereas in the heathenislands tobacco, hatchets, knives, muskets, powder and shot were the only saleable things. The 'useful' articles of trade included unmade cloth, shirts, trousers,

handkerchiefs, coats, caps, straw hats and bonnets. Although one might queryhis standards of usefulness ? hats and bonnets being not manifestly more useful

43C Geddie, Letters, 47.44 Shineberg, They Came, 149-50.45 Indis, In theNew Hebrides, 277.46Robert Steel, TheNew Hebrides and Christian Missions with a Sketch of the Labour Traffic: Notes of a Cruise Throughthe Group in a Mission Vessel (London 1880).


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than steel knives and axes ? the centrality of clothing for Christian converts nodoubt enhanced the propensity for trade. Still Shineberg's analysis of the effectsof the sandalwood trade might make us cautious of his grander claim that moremanufactured goodswere sold on islands with missionaries than in all the other

islands of the group.47As well as being a distinguishing marker of the Christian versus the heathen,clothing also served tomark distinctions between local Christians. Steel reportsthat native teachers 'generally receive payments for their services in clothing',48and that

It is felt to be desirable that they and their wives should be attired somewhat betterthan the people generally as an example to the rest... The teachers wear Crimeanshirts with fustian or serge trousers, and have alpaca or cloth coats for specialoccasions.49

As well as effecting some changes in the patterns of work and the habits ofclothing, these missionaries tried to reform domestic space. Domestic architecture in the southern islands of Vanuatu was seen as a symptom of the savagestate of the people. Dwellings were typically described as rough or mean: Margaret Whitecross Paton tells us that she first mistook the houses of people for thehouses of pigs.50 Indigenous houses were one room huts constructed fromwooden supports, with thatched roof stretching to the ground. This single roomwas used by a household for cooking, eating and sleeping. Segregation was preserved not between the conjugal couple and their children but between husbandand wife ? in both eating and sleeping patterns.The houses which the missionaries constructed, though made out of localmaterials and themselves quite primitive, were conceived as the foundation ofcivilised family life. They often had frames of local timber, walls of lime (burntfrom local coral), internal woven partitions, thatched roofs, and floor coveringsof local mats or coral over the dirt floor. They had at least two rooms ? thussegregating a public space for eating and sitting from a private space for sleeping.When rooms were added, parents and children normally slept separately.Kitchens were usually separate structures, so that the smoke from the fuel stovesof the period was kept out of the house. Such multiple roomed structures were amatter of consternation to the local people. Margaret Whitecross Paton reportedthat when they added two new rooms to their two-roomed house (including aseparate study for her husband John), the locals called it the 'Great House'.51

Scrupulous attention was paid to rninirnising the ravages of the heat, hurricanes and disease. The writings of the missionary husbands vaunt the advan? Steel The New Hebrides, 51. Compare Shineberg, They Came,

145-62.? Steel, The New Hebrides, 58.49 Ibid.50M. Paton, Letters and Sketches, 21.5i Ibid., 59.


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tages of the verandah, of cross ventilation, and of the need to find an elevatedsite not only to catch the breezes, but also to avoid mosquito-ridden swamps andtidal waves foUowing hurricanes. But the mission home was not just to satisfy themissionaries' own longings for domestic order, cleanliness and health, but to be amodel for the local people. To quote Margaret Whitecross Paton,

We must not let ourselves 'down' because we are among savages but rather try to Uftthem up to our Christian level in all things. One's Home has somuch influence onone's work and on Ufe and character.52

Few ni-Vanuatu emulated what they saw as the grandeur of these domesticestablishments,53 but much later housing patterns shifted in conformity with anew notion of segregated spaces ? in separate sleeping and eating houses, forinstance.54 Moreover, although never approaching the domestic furnishings,equipment and accoutrements of the early missionary homes, domestic equipment slowly changed to include introduced European goods alongside theindigenous ? as weU as bamboo knives and vessels, wooden platters, shellfishand blackpalm scrapers, pandanus mats and coverings, there were increasinglysteel knives and scissors, iron pots and glass bottles, and caUco.55Food was never such a cause for missionary intervention as clothing anddomestic space. Although critical of the Umited nature of the indigenous diet,these missionary women did not do much to promote the use of Europeanalternatives, partly because the suppUes of them, even for their own households,were restricted. Jessie IngUs, by her husband's report, used many local ingredients in her cooking ? taro, fish, pork and goat's meat, supplementing thesewith bread, cake and pastries when suppUes of flour and sugar could be procuredfrom the mission vessel John Williams.56 But there was one food practice whichoccasioned great concern, namely the practice of feeding new born babies withpre-masticated food ? tubers or fish. Charlotte Geddie described how infants onAneityum had in the past been fed 'aU kinds of trash', but that since her effortsinfants were getting only their proper nourishment (i.e. breast milk) and weremuch healthier than before.57

Intervening in infant feeding was part of a wider process of reforming therelation of parents and children, and in particular mothering. The missionariesosculated between two contradictory views of ni-Vanuatu mothers ? the firstthat they were caUous and indifferent, the second that they were indulgent andlacking in discipline. The first was attested to by incorrect infant feeding, bymothers failing to keep their children properly protected from heat, cold and

52 Ibid., 61.55 Steel The New Hebrides, 49.54Compare Margaret Jolly, 'Sacred spaces: churches, men's houses and households in South Pentecost,Vanuatu', in Jolly and Macintyre, Family and Gender, 213-35.55 Shineberg, They Came, 146, 148, 149-50.56 Inglis, In theNew Hebrides, 272-3.57G Geddie, Letters, 34.


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rain, but most spectacularly by infanticide. The missionaries alleged that infanticide, in particular female infanticide, was widely practised. John Inglis reporteda differential attitude to male and female children evidenced in an incidentshortly after his arrival when

a womangave birth

to her third daughter in succession. On learning that the baby was a daughter and not a son, she was allegedto have cried out to the surrounding women, 'Oh kill it, kill it'.58 In the censuswhich he took in 1853, John Geddie was struck by the disproportionate numberof boys, and also by the overall scarcity of children. Thus out of a population of3,800 he reported that there were 600 more males than females. He alleged thatthe cause of the disparity between the sexes was both widow strangulation inadulthood, and female infanticide.59

Infanticide has prevailed on this island to a great extent. Parents have been accustomed to put their children to death in order to be relieved from the trouble ofbringing them up. The new born infant was either taken to the bush and left toperish there, or eke itwas laid down on the shore at low tide to be carried away bythe returning waves. Great numbers of infant children were put to death in one orother of these ways, especially children of the female sex.60

There seems little doubt that infanticide was practised in the case of the fatheror the mother dying, and given the practice of widow strangulation on Aneityumthe first often implied the second. It does seem that more female than maleinfants were killed ? Norma McArthur estimates between 20 and 25%. Butwhether when both parents were alive they would kill an infant because offeeling overburdened is highly unlikely. The practice of infanticide clearly didnot imply a lack of parental love. This is evident not only in the parental indulgence of which the missionaries complained, but also in reports of parental grief.Thus Charlotte Geddie notes that the death of a child could cause such grief onthe part of a father that it could threaten the life of the mother. She reports a manwho was a principal chief threatening to kill his wife if his child died.61 The infantdid die but the Geddies succeeded in restraining him from carrying out histhreat.

Whatever motivated infanticide on some occasions, it does not suggest thatthe Aneityumese in general were callous or indifferent parents. Indeed on several occasions Charlotte Geddie lamented the degree of parental indulgence. Shewrote that she did not allow her own children to spend too much time with localpeople as they gave them everything they asked for,62 and suggested that,

5? Inglis, In theNew Hebrides, 21S.59 But see McArthur, 'Population and prehistory*, 12-13. This is an excellent and very intricate account ofthe demography of Aneityum, which looks both at the effect of female infanticide and widow strangulation onthe sex ratio in the population at contact, and also at the disastrous effects of a series of epidemics, which leftAneityum severely depopulated by the late 19th century.60J. Geddie, Misi Gete:John Geddie Pioneer Missionary to theNew Hebrides, R. S. Miller ed (Launceston 1975[1848-57]), 153.61C Geddie, Letters, 26-7.62 Ibid, 28.


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especiaUy with young children, the parents never attempted to discipline them.Given the asymmetrical nature of child care, this was especiaUy a criticism ofmothering.

The poor mothers are perfect slaves to them, until they are five or six years old, Ihave been speaking a good deal to the women lately, about their children and the sinof giving in to them always. They say what can we do, ifwe deny them, they wiUscream until we are obUged to give way to them. I told them they must be firm, andwhen their children saw that there was no use in persisting they would soon desist.I think that some of them are trying to act upon my advice.63But itwas not only the mothering relation that was thought in need of reform.Even more dreadful for the missionaries perhaps was the relation of husbandsand wives. The missionary Uterature is fuU of laments about the horror of maleviolence towards women, apparent to the missionaries in the physical and mental cruelty of husbands, female suicide, and worst of aU widow strangulation.

They saw widow strangulation as the culmination of a marriage relation whichwas based on male brutaUty and female servitude. There is compelling evidenceof violence towards women, particularly wives. Geddie provides a gruesomeaccount of a husband clubbing his wife so badly that 'her skuU was fractured,portions of her brain came away, and her body was otherwise dreadfuUy

mangled'.64 This woman recovered after several weeks nursing at the mission,but he reports other cases of murder of disobedient wives, and several instancesof suicide by women who had suffered physical abuse or iU-treatment at thehands of their husbands.65 How widespread such violence was is hard to establish. What was routine, however, was the practice of widow strangulation. AsCharlotte Geddie Harrington wrote, 'the strangling of widows immediately afterthe death of the husband was universaUy practised'.66 In trying to prevent thedeed, Mr Geddie was on one occasion surrounded by the male relatives withuplifted clubs, and rendered powerless while the rite was performed.67 But moresituational evidence of this incident and other interventions suggests that theresistance was not

justfrom the male kin but from the female kin and indeed

often from the widows themselves.Several entries from the journals of John Geddie and the letters of CharlotteGeddie for the years 1849-50 report attempts to stop widow strangulation. Soon 20 November 1849 John Geddie reports a failed attempt.68 He went to a

nearby viUage where a married man was dying but was plainly an 'unwelcomevisitor' and was impeded in various ways in his attempts to ?stop the widow from63 Ibid, 33.64J. Geddie, Aitsi Gete, 188.65 Ibid, 83-4,66This was only true of Aneityum. On Tanna by contrast only the widows of high-ranking men were

strangled67C Geddie, Letters, 15.68J. Geddie, Aim Gete, 60.


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being strangled. Some denied the dying man had a wife, others said she was at adistant village, and some native confidantes even tricked Geddie into believingthat another woman present was the wife. Geddie's entreaties on this occasionfailed to prevent the strangulation since the woman had already been secretedaway, strangled and then buried at sea, beside her husband. On 15January 1850he, or more correctly a local convert Waihit, was more successful, but on thisoccasion it was clear that the woman herself did not want to be saved. 'Thewidow herself was bent on strangulation and cried out that if they did not put herto death she would strangle herself.69 On this occasion it was not Geddie'sentreaties but rather the threats of Waihit to kill the relatives if they killed thewoman that saved the widow's life. Geddie was pleased that this was effected bya 'native' rather than himself, and commented optimistically that 'the horridsystem of strangulation has now received a check from which it will neverrecover'.70

But in fact isolated cases of widow strangulation continued for several years.71This isnot surprising given the religious centrality of the practice. We do not findmuch in the way of description or explanation of the practice from the missionaries' own accounts, but an anonymous observer reporting from Aneityum inthe same period (circa 1854 and probably a sailor who worked for the sandalwood trader Paddon) was not so reluctant to record and interpret the rite:Immolation his Practised or was on this island itExisted in full force up to the year1852 ... at this time of my life and wanderings ... Iwas one of the Party thatRescued a female a going to get strangled... and took the said woman to the Isle ofPines in 1853 and Ibelieve this act put a stop to it.. . that his to say inPublic... The

Ceremony for Contemplation is carried out in this wise... 3 days after the death ofthe husband ... the Woman his escorted to the house her husbands near relatives

where his corpse his ready ... to be disposed of.. . accompanied by her nearestrelations .. . she his in her best namely a flax ready tied above her thighs ... shecarries a small quantity of each kind [of] food on her back... it is a flat sinnet madeout of raaw flax .. . and very fine ... the might be 100 . .. of feet in it.. . this shewears on her neck ... on her

approachingthe

corpseshe falls on her knees and

laments his goodness receiving the food she has brought for him on his big journeyand then rises to her feet; and says she is ready to go with her husband undoing thecords and putting the bight around her Neck... and holds out the ends in each hand... the ends is taken by other woman . . . and taughting up . .. and perhaps 3 or 4other woman on each end... will pull away... till life is Extinct... At this state ofaffairs, these women Stranglers have a Cry and a laugh. . .and begins tying her up ina mat... for burial. . .when this is done. . . the 2 corpses is laid side by side under ahouse or in a thicket at hand... or else a stage is made fore them above ground. . .and covered up . . .with the bark of a tree . . . the food being thrown close at hand... the relations of this unfortunate female his feasted ... by the friends of the

69 Ibid., 65.70 Ibid7i For instance on 17Mar. 1857, ibid., 230.


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44 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORYdeceased man ? this ends the ceremony. It is common for a man to have more thanone wife ... in this instance the 1st wife gets strangled while the 2nd or 3rd may

marry again the readers of these pages will bear inmind this is all voluntarily done... on the part of the woman and her friends ... they have no desire to avoid it inany way... for she goes with the husband... that he may not be solitary... and byhimself when his body transmigrates... this act of Devotion... will lead us to thinkand believe ... that they had no religion.72

Inglis's more perfunctory comment on the meaning of the ritual suggests whatthis 'act of devotion' really implied. The wife was strangled on the death of herhusband, that her spirit might accompany him to the land of the dead, to be hisservant there as she had been in this world.73

The persistence of the practice on Aneityum beyond 1852 might be taken asthe simple continuation of these indigenous beliefs in the necessary spiritualunity of husband and wife in death, or itmay be that the remaining heathenschose this as a way of demonstrating the force of indigenous traditions in theface of introduced Christian values. But although widow strangulation mightultimately be adjudged to be a male cruelty against women, we must alsoacknowledge that the act was often performed by close female kin, and thatsome women, prior to and beyond missionary intervention, desired to bestrangled. We can only speculate as to the women's motives ? perhaps a beliefthat spiritual union with their husbands was an honourable fate, perhapsbecause a widow was an anomaly not to be tolerated, or perhaps because theyexperienced real and intolerable grief at a husband's death.74

so in these several ways we might see the intervention of the early missionariesas an attempt at 'domesticating' women, of redirecting their work towards themaintenance of the home with the introduction of new forms of work, clothingand housing, of reforming and intensifying the maternal relation, and finally ofcivilising and celebrating the conjugal relation of husband and wife. These attempts at domesticating had different results and evoked different responsesfrom local women. Attempts to redirect women's work often merely added newdomestic duties to the pre-existing work which women did. Clothing did becomeroutine for Christian converts, and looking after this new cloth probably occasioned more work for women than the working of the old cloths ? pandanusmats and tapa. Novel models of domestic architecture had little influence until

much later, and then only by instituting the separation of eating and sleepinghuts. Infanticide and widow strangulation were effectively stopped ? at least as72Anonymous, History of the Pacific, by a European setder in the New Hebrides (Cambridge University

Library nd). Punctuation and spelling as in original75 Inglis, In the New Hebrides, 31.74 I am grateful to Anne Chowning for this suggestion about grief, based in part on her insights into widowstrangulation in Sengsene, New Britain. Compare Anne Chowning 'Culture and biology among the Sengseng ofNew Britain*, Journal of thePolynesian Society, 89 (1980), 7-32.


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public acts, although they might have persisted as private practices. But otherpractices continued in public ? mothers continued to feed their infant childrenpre-masticated taro, believing this essential to their growth. Despite the missionary emphasis

on maternal nurture, mothers still shared child care with fathers,older siblings and a wide circle of kin and affines. Men continued in acts ofdomestic violence despite missionary intervention. The partial success of thisproject of domestication may be seen asmaking some improvements in the livesof women, but the Christian missions also imparted a new model of male domination, predicated on a devaluation of women as domestic beings and acelebration of men as public beings.There was one aspect of missionary effort which seemed at variance with the

project of domestication, namely teaching local women to read and write. Themissionary women were for the most part enthusiasts about women's education? literacy was thought crucial to understanding and imparting the word of God.This also meant acquiring new knowledge themselves, in learning to speak, readand write in the local language. These early Protestant missionaries laid enormous stress on attaining fluency in the local language. John Inglis commentedthat a thorough knowledge of the indigenous language was an 'indispensablecondition' of a missionary's success. Traders he observed might be able to getalong with 'broken sandalwood English', but the missionary must be able tospeak 'like a native'.75 This condition was seen to apply with equal force to the

missionary women. So John Inglis says of his wife, Jessie,From the very first she set herself, as a duty to acquire a knowledge of the nativelanguage ... She never thought of speaking to the natives in broken English or

pigeon [sic] or sandalwood English as it is called.76A similar complementarity between husband and wife in learning the local

language emerges in the case of the Patons. Margaret Whitecross Paton revealedthat after she and her husband John had been struggling with the tense markersin Aniwan for some months, they simultaneously realised the form:Iput my Baby in her [Nurses's] arms, and flew out by the back, the shortest cut tothe Church, where John and some of the Natives were working. Imet him, on the

way, rushing home, hammer in hand to make known his discovery, and we bothshouted to each other in the same breath ? Ka is the sign of the Future.77Such was the concern with language and articulating ideas that even the

sewing classes were rarely just for passive instruction in hemming, embroideryor patchwork, but also occasions for debate and discussion, albeit about acceptable topics such as the duties of parents and children or the moral of lastSunday's sermon.78 But as well as her afternoon sewing classes Charlotte Geddie

75 Ingiis, In theNew Hebrides, 122.76 Ibid, 267-8.77M. Paton, Letters and Sketches, 67.78C Geddie, Letters, 31.


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46 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORYgave her mornings to teaching reading, writing and ciphering (arithmetic).These classes were typicaUy segregated, with the boys being taught at one end ofthe church and the girls at the other.The schools succeeded in educating many local women as weU as local men.They also created a Uterate ?lite of local teachers and laid the foundations of anew Church hierarchy. Thus both the Geddies and the IngUses chose pupils fromthe more influential famiUes initially, and then when the pressure of prospectivescholars became too great favoured educating those from teacher's famiUes.

Ultimately, however, even the women of influential famiUes became Uttle morethan the wives of Church leaders or teachers. Women's re?giosity was certainlyencouraged by these early Protestants, but there was stiU no prospect that awoman might become a teacher or a preacher. Although encouraged to beeducated and articulate in some measure, the role of the indigenous woman inthe Church, like that of the European missionary women, was to be an auxiUaryto the husband. Despite great stress being laid on getting local people to speak inchurch, to read scripture, to lead prayers and even dehver sermons, the attemptto encourage local idioms for Christian concepts and to articulate God's word inlocal languages was reserved for men.79 This was most plain in the case of Johnand Jessie Inglis. John paints a picture of them as a cosy companionate couple,sharing the reading both of scripture and the canonical texts of the ReformedPresbyterian Church

?Cunningham, MiUer, Moffat and Livingstone. Jessie

wassaid to have been outraged at the stance taken by another, unnamed, missionarywife ? namely that she left such reading to her husband. But although she readtheology, and was her husband's editor and proofreader, Jessie Inglis neverherself wrote anything for the press.80 Her husband claimed 'she was always keptso busy making history, that she had no time to write it'.81

Thus, the result of Presbyterian missions was not a simple and successfuldomestication of local women. The missionary couple provided an ideaUsedmodel of aworld divided into gendered domains ? the domestic and the pubUc.But local people only emulated this model in a partial way. Women thoughexposed to the sphere of Uterate education and coUective Ufe in the Church wereUke their white counterparts relegated to being auxiUaries in that world. Clearlythese missionary couples were not the only models of European 'homes', nor theonly colonial agents who effected changes in the indigenous relations of men andwomen. The domestic establishments of traders, planters, and later colonialofficials presented rather different models of domesticity. But missionaries were

79Niel Gunson warns against accepting the public definition of translation as the sole accomplishmentof the husband, since in other missionary situations wives assisted their husbands, but this was not alwaysacknowledged (pers. comm. 1989).80 Inglis, In theNew Hebrides, 286.81 Ibid, 286.


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TO SAVE THE GIRLS FOR BRIGHTER AND BETTER UVES 47

more influential ? because they stayed in one place a long time, learnt languages, and interacted far more with local people.82In the indigenous system, too, the lives of men and women had been segregated but itwas not on the basis of a division between work outside the homeand work within, nor of women being exclusively responsible for nurturing the'family'. Moreover, unlike the separate spheres of the European ideal, where the

public domain is seen to transcend or eclipse the domestic, here collective publicconcerns were essentially what we might call domestic. Ancestral religion wasbased on the sacralisation and celebration of human kinship rather than itstranscendence by a spiritual union with a primordial deity. Politics was inextricably grounded in the coalitions and conflicts of kin-based collectivities andmarital alliances rather than struggles in an overarching realm of a corporation

or a state aspiring to a rationality beyond kinship.83In conclusion, what of the way inwhich these white missionary women relatedto ni-Vanuatu women, and local women to them? The missionary texts aresaturated with derogatory references to savages and heathens, and although thismay be seen to apply with particular force to ni-Vanuatu men, the women arenot exempt. The language used is like much of the language of the colonial eramatronising and infantilising. Thus grown women as well as children and adolescents are spoken of as 'girls'. These white Presbyterian women unhesitatinglybelieved that

theyshould

guideni-Vanuatu women as if

theywere their own

children.But herein lies an interesting paradox. Despite their own stress on mothering,these women were typically deprived of their own children, either by actual lossin death or else by their removal to adoptive families or boarding schools backhome. They often lament that this is the hardest burden of the mission field,84and even acknowledge that they are seeking surrogate children among the local

population. It is partly in this context that we have to understand the heartfeltand intimate friendships they established with local women. Charlotte Geddiewrote mournfully of the loss of her friend Mary, in the devastating measlesepidemic on Aneityum in 1861.

My good, intelligent and useful Mary is gone too ? oh, how Ido feel her death somuch every day. She was an affectionate daughter to me. Her husband (Lathela)feels her loss very much, poor fellow, he will not soon find one to fill her place. Theywere a very happy couple, and much more enlightened than the rest of the natives.They had lived long beside us and had daily intercourse with us and were so anxiousto acquire knowledge. Mary has left us a fine little boy who I feel itmy duty to takecharge of. Not only ourselves but the cause owes much to Mary. She was the first girl

82 See also Jolly and Macintyre, Family and Gender, 6ff.85Compare Jolly, 'Sacred spaces', 220-3.84M. Paton, Letters and Sketches, 16.


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48 JOURNAL OF PACIFIC HISTORYwho came to live with me, and the first female to embrace Christianity. She did allthat lay in her power for the cause.85

Alas, we have no independent way of knowing how Mary herself perceived thecause, her unique position within it, and indeed her relation to Charlotte Geddie.Partly because of the nature of the sources, we have to be careful that in constructing a history of these Presbyterian women in Vanuatu we do not create animage of empowered white women ministering to passive suffering black

women, or relegate indigenous women to being passive recipients of colonialprojects. Some recent histories appear to be not just about white women in thecolonies but written from their viewpoint. Now this may be defensible in thelight of the depiction of white women as idle racist bigots, responsible for theruin of Empire.86 It is probably better than writing^ colonised women as somefeminist anthropologists try to do. Rather we should try to deal with the complexities of interaction, not treating it as hostile encounter, or as the essentialsympathy of sisterhood.87 The study of women in colonial history requires arecognition of both difference and shared interest.

85G Geddie, Letters, 52.86This same argument is made in two different contexts in Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire:European Women in Colonial Nigeria (London/Oxford 1987), and in Claudia Knapman, White Women inFifi 18351930: The Ruin ofEmpire? (Sydney 1986). For a comparison and a critique see Jane Haggis, 'Gendering colonialism or colonising gender: recent women's studies approaches to white women and the history of Britishcolonialism', Womens Studies International Forum, 13:1-2(1990), 105-15.87 For a more contemporary consideration of the problem see Margaret Jolly, The politics of difference:feminism, colonialism and decolonization in Vanuatu , inG. Bottomley and M. de Lepervanche (eds), Inter

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