ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“It Was My Destiny”: 19th Century Women Medical Missionaries, Gender, and Empire in India

• In Event: Late Nineteenth-century Sciences

English Abstract

The Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania pioneered the entrance of white, American women into the medical field in the late 19th century. A substantial number of these women, after obtaining their degrees, went on to become medical missionaries, leaving America to provide medical and spiritual aid to the people of India. For women like Dr. Clara A. Swain, they felt as though they were destined to work abroad, converting “heathens” to Christianity and healing their illness. While in India, these women worked in leading positions within hospitals and clinics, interacting with the highest classes of Indian men while teaching and leading Indian women to be their subordinates. Their missionary work afforded them power they could not achieve as women back home in America.

The self-actualization these women gained through medical mission work, however, concealed the work of feminized imperialism. While there has been much work on medical imperialism as well as work on the authority women gained through missionary work, there is an absence in the analysis of the imperial motives and results of gendered medical missionary work. Through examining what women medical missionaries of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in the 19th century said and left unsaid in their personal writings, I use a transnational approach to show how medical missionary work expanded imperial ties between Britain and America and how women’s domestic image produced a gendered veneer of innocence which concealed the violence of imperialism.

Author

• Allison Love, University of New Mexico