| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 339 words from this article are provided below; about 686 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Myra Rutherdale. Women and the White Man's God: Gender and Race in the Canadian Mission Field. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. 2002. Pp. xxx, 194. Cloth $85.00, paper $29.95.
Today, the arctic and subarctic regions of northern Canada conjure up images of sparsely populated, inhospitable environments where only the heartiest survive. This idea of the north has long captured the Western imagination and attracted scores of "manly" adventurers, among them missionaries. Historical reality, however, paints quite a different picture of a region composed of a range of climates and geographies, populated by hospitable indigenous cultures, and where the majority of missionaries who came to work were women. Myra Rutherdale's book examines women and mission work in the Canadian north from 1860 to 1940. Focused on the dominant Protestant denomination operating in the region, the Anglican Church (Church of England), Rutherdale locates the place of women in the missionary enterprise. Almost immediately she overturns historical and contemporary assumptions that women were in the minority in northern mission fields. Counting missionary wives and their essential, yet unpaid, labor as well as numerous unmarried, salaried female workers who increasingly worked alone at their own mission stations, women outnumbered men. The book is also worthy of note because it places the material within an international body of scholarship on colonialism, particularly discourse analysis, gender and imperialism, and women and religion.	1
Rutherdale begins her study by positioning women within Canadian Anglicanism and interpreting how the church responded to its own feminization in the nineteenth century while still remaining a patriarchal institution. Beyond the numerical dominance of women in northern Anglican missions, by 1923 Women's Auxiliaries financed forty-three percent of the Canadian Anglican Church's domestic and foreign mission work. Mission history in Rutherdale's hands becomes a fruitful exploration of how gender and racial identities are maintained or challenged. Missionary discourse reflected "preconceived ideas about empire, colonialism, race and culture, travel, gender, and religions ... often in conflict with actual experience" (p. xiv).	. . .

There are about 686 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.