In Christian Imperial Feminism, Gale L. Kenny offers a deep study of White ecumenical Protestant women and their missionary (both foreign and domestic) endeavors. Kenny analyzes these women, their organizations, and the literature they produced through a racialized lens. As she states in her introduction, “Missionary societies and churchwomen councils unified White women across denominations through a shared commitment to Christian Imperial Feminism and a related religio-racial identity” (6).
Kenny argues that historians have tended to contrast liberal White Protestant groups with conservative Evangelicals, assuming that liberal Protestants were less racist and imperialistic, but Kenny’s aim is to show how liberal Protestants were also exporting their racist and imperialist beliefs. She puts it bluntly – “Whether or not these church women were ‘feminists’ in the second-wave sense of the term, it is unarguable that they sought to exercise their power as women through managing race and religion” (10). Kenny wants to demonstrate that liberal Protestant women were not part of a story of gradual progress to equality but active agents of oppression.
White Imperial Feminism is a relatively slim volume, coming in at 269 pages, including end matter, but the text is dense. The book consists of an introduction, six chapters, and a short conclusion. It fits into the larger categories of women’s Christian history and global missions history, but it is unique in its analysis through the lens of both race and imperialism.
The introduction provides the reader with the basic outline of the book. Kenny explains her basic premise, main arguments, and definitions. The first two chapters are focused on the women’s missionary movement in the early twentieth century. Chapter 1, entitled: “Christian Imperial Feminisms and Mission Study” focuses primarily on United Mission Study textbooks. As Kenny explains, in the 1880s and 1890s, editors of missionary magazines promoted mission studies for women’s church groups, especially church groups that promoted missions. Kenny spends much of this chapter exploring the writings of Helen Barrett Montgomery, a prolific writer, who eventually became the first woman president of the Northern Baptist Convention. Kenny makes the argument that while these books promoted education, they also “racialized Christian imperial feminism as White” (15). The second chapter (“Christian Imperial Feminism in Missionary Pageants”) is focused on pageants. It is a glimpse into a strange practice that has been completely left behind in progressive Christianity. Kenny explains that pageants were put on by a variety of groups, both religious and secular, but in the early twentieth century, Protestant missionary women adopted pageantry as both entertainment and as a way to broadcast their faith and beliefs to a wider audience.
The next four chapters focus on the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter three (“Learning to Cooperate by Cooperating”) offers up a history of White-led churchwomen’s organizations. While women had put a lot of effort into denominational missionary societies in previous decades, these were largely obsolete by the 1930s because many had been assumed into male-led mission boards. However, there were ecumenical groups, such as the Woman’s Boards of Foreign Missions, the Council for Women for Home Missions, and the Federal Council of Churches in which White women activity participated. Kenny looks at some of the conflict between men and women over the issue of control of missionary work, though much of the chapter is focused on how women were cooperating to advance their own vision of the Christian social order.
Chapter four (“Christian Americanization and the Tri-Faith Movement”) focuses on White Protestant Americanization efforts. Kenny examines how Protestants worked in conjunction with Catholic and Jewish women’s groups (who also ran settlement houses and had Americanization programs). Chapter five (“The Spiritual Feelings and Religious Politics of Interracial Cooperation”) focuses on interracial cooperation within Christian women’s groups, with the main focus being on Black and White interaction.
The sixth and final chapter (“Christian Citizens, World Citizens”) focuses on the discourse of Christian citizenship and world citizenship in the 1930s and 1940s. Kenny looks at how women interpreted political activism through a Christian lens and aspired to build an “empire of Christ.” The conclusion tries her previous work to modern instances of White women-led imperialism.
Throughout the book, Kenny makes it clear that she has a particular agenda. Kenny paints a picture of Protestant (and occasionally Jewish and Catholic women) women operating as agents of imperialism. Kenny writes about her subjects without sympathy. Instead of complex human beings, they often come off as villains inflicting harm upon the globe. Whether you find her arguments convincing will depend on your own understanding of missions, Christianity, and even gender.
Regarding Kenny’s historical work, she utilized primary sources to draw conclusions. She worked with numerous manuscript collections, periodicals, and various other primary sources such as woman’s missionary publications. In addition, she has a robust bibliography of secondary literature. More representation from global scholars would have made her arguments stronger.
There are times when Kenny makes strong claims with little evidence. For example, in chapter two, Kenny argues that White Protestant pageants were to be held during the day to differentiate them from the largely Jewish theater scene of New York and Chicago. She does cite another book but positing this sort of causality requires a more robust exploration. This was an issue at various points the book. While racism and imperialism were certainly prevalent in the first half of the twentieth century, I did wonder whether it was responsible to label all White Protestant women racist and imperialistic based on the actions and publications of a limited number of ecumenical organizations?
Regarding readership, for academics specializing in the history of global missions, modern Protestantism, or modern women’s history, the book may prove helpful. The book could be used in a college, or graduate level class, but there is a level of assumed knowledge that the average lay history reader likely does not have.
