Negotiating Palestinian Womanhood offers a productive account of Quaker female educational missionary activity in Palestine and the ways students embraced and contested missionary conceptions of womanhood. The work primarily focuses on the Friends Girls’ School (FGS) in Ramallah within the broader context of Quaker and other missionary educational work in the region from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth centuries. Its broad conclusions align consistently with scholarship on educational missions in the Middle East, highlighting the ways missionary educators promoted personal and social uplift through character formation. These points are nuanced through the details Othman uncovers using archival records and interviews with former (FGS) students, which provide a textured portrait of missions in the Palestinian context.
Othman argues that the missionary teachers at the girls’ school attempted to inculcate a vision of womanhood deeply connected with preparation for wifehood and motherhood, which emphasized Quaker values of reform, service, and internationalism while also promoting a broadly-conceived general education alongside home economics and domesticity training. The students in turn adapted their teachers’ vision, reframing such ideas within larger nationalist aspirations, as well as configuring them with existing traditional values. Othman emphasizes the uniqueness of Quaker education, although this is perhaps overstated. For instance, peacemaking and internationalism, while a core part of the Quaker teaching canon, also had a broad cachet in non-Quaker institutions in the region (especially after WWI where ideas of internationalism were endorsed by many of the educational missions in the region). Still, the work offers detailed evidence of the means by which such values were promoted among the student population, and, more importantly, the ways in which students embraced and adapted such ideas.
Likewise, Othman highlights the way that missionaries benefited from colonial structures and understood themselves as superior to the Palestinian students they were teaching. This often manifested in tropic perceptions of the oppression of Arab (and especially Muslim) women and the women missionaries as uniquely equipped to rescue them. However, while the work on occasion delves into race and postcolonial theory to make sense of some of some of the activities of missionaries, this is often done in only a perfunctory manner. For instance, Othman in a brief discussion of the tradition of charitable “White Gift” giving at the school, writes, “one may see that a racial hierarchy influenced the labeling of the gifts as “White.” This discourse of whiteness is a continuous vein that runs through missionary terminology that uses whiteness and darkness” (120–121). And that statement effectively begins and concludes the discussion of such terminology.
Further exploration of racial/racist underpinnings in the language of the missionary project at the FGS might have helped Othman's work stand out among the increasingly numerous accounts of missionary projects in the Middle East. However, the limited examples that Othman provides throughout the work seem more like a nod to the notion that recognizing such topics should be addressed, rather than actually addressing them. This is especially notable in the “White Gift” example, given that the labeling of the gifts probably has more to do with the larger Protestant tradition of “White Gift Sunday,” in which gifts were wrapped in plain white paper, referencing a story about a Chinese king whose people gave him so-wrapped presents to highlight their love in giving, rather than the gift itself. Such a story, as it has been recounted in the persistence of the tradition by many churches, reflects a complex Orientalist and racialized narrative that warrants further investigation in its particular deployments—such as at the FGS.
The work is at its best when it delves into the records and narratives of students of the school, highlighting the often-neglected experiences of those who studied within missionary schools. The complex lives of the students of the FGS are often at the forefront and reveal the ways the students understood and adapted their Quaker education. Here Othman offers a compelling portrait of how Quaker educational values came into tension with the nationalist struggle of Mandate-era Palestine—where the Quaker teachers saw such values as producing socially-engaged, but ultimately submissive women. Othman highlights stories of how students embraced and adapted missionary education to their own purposes. On the one hand, many students accepted the Quaker emphasis on modesty of dress and simplicity of life. On the other hand, numerous students began writing and speaking in promotion of gender equality within the nationalist movement. Likewise, as participants within nationalist activism, some students challenged the colonial hegemony on which the mission itself was at least partially dependent. Othman notably observes that the nationalist spirit among students, which the American educators initially discourage, eventually forced the missionaries to confront their positions and begin to take more seriously the issues at stake. Importantly, the students of the school are revealed not as passive subjects of mission, but as active agents navigating the pressures of the missionary, traditional, and nationalist expectations.
Negotiating Palestinian Womanhood adds to the emerging canon of missionary studies, presenting both the missionaries and the students as equal participants. Othman carefully contextualizes the experiences of the missionaries and students of the FGS in Ramallah within the larger social-political context of Palestine as it changed under Ottoman and British authority. The work offers a compelling case study, confirming many of the emerging arguments and approaches of the recent trends in mission history.
