Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.1 | The History Cooperative

Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries. By Amanda Porterfield. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xii, 179 pp. $39.95, isbn 0-19-511301-2.)

In this brief volume Amanda Porterfield provides a much-needed analysis of the religious ideas that spurred Anglo-American Protestant women into mission work in the early part of the nineteenth century. Suggesting that the foundations for women's mission work are to be found not within denominational history, but in the history of women's education, Porterfield begins her story with Mary Lyon, the founder of Mount Holyoke Seminary (now a college). Lyon's life, argues the author, exemplified larger social changes in New England—communities in flux, the declining importance of the family as a unit of production, and the breakdown of traditional gender roles and patterns of community. Lyon did what many other women of her generation did: she found new life in expanded educational opportunities. She traded domestic duties for teaching. In 1821 she entered the Ladies Seminary at Byfield where she encountered New Divinity thought combined with an ideology of republican motherhood. In the years that followed, Lyon built on this foundation, shaping her ideas for a female academy that would prove to be a mainstay for the mission enterprise, training women for work that would be redeeming. . . .

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