Book Review

Canada and the United States

Although not delivering exactly what its title promises, this book provides some useful insights into Mary Lyon's theological ideas and analyzes how Lyon's Mount Holyoke students used their training when they became foreign missionaries. In the book's first half, Amanda Porterfield uncovers the New Divinity strands of Lyon's theology and demonstrates how those filaments became entwined with the ideology of Republican Motherhood. In the second half, she uses case studies to examine the work and varying impact of about a dozen Mount Holyoke alumnae at mission stations in Persia, India, and South Africa. In both sections, she takes issue with contemporary feminist scholars and theologians whose lack of sympathy for "the missionary impulse to self-denial" (p. 26), she believes, impedes their understanding of self-sacrificing nineteenth-century women. Porterfield is similarly critical of historians who fail "to appreciate the importance of religion in social and intellectual change" (p. 36).

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Many historians of women and of religion will be puzzled by these complaints. Surely some of the best recent work in the field has both recaptured historical figures' own understandings of their lives and analyzed the broader contexts in which those lives were lived. Moreover, the book's analysis of women missionaries diverges only somewhat from that of historians such as Patricia Hill, Jane Hunter, Mary Zweip, and Joan Jacobs Brumberg and is undercut by gaps and silences in the available evidence.

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