In 1878, Nathaniel G. Clark, foreign secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, hailed the establishment two years earlier of the Constantinople Home in Istanbul—“the very center of Mohammedan power”—as a powerful symbol of American Protestant women's dedication to their less fortunate sisters in the Ottoman Empire (p. 1). Founded and funded by the Woman's Board of Missions of the Congregational Church in Boston, the Home began life as a “modest mission school” whose pupils were mostly the daughters of Orthodox converts to Protestantism. How it evolved into the American College for Girls, “a preeminent institution of higher education that celebrated its identity as an American liberal arts college rather than its Protestant evangelical origins” (p. 141) and enrolled international students of many faiths, is one of the revealing stories told by Barbara Reeves-Ellington in her engaging new monograph.
The book joins a growing number of studies that examine the expansion of American influence abroad through the lens of Protestant missionary history. Focusing primarily on the interactions among American Board missionaries and Bulgarian Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Balkans and western Anatolia between 1831 and 1908, the year that the Woman's Board ceded control of the American Girls College to an independent board of trustees in New York City, Reeves-Ellington employs a transnational approach that strives to balance the preponderance of missionary sources with close attention to harder-to-glean local perspectives. These she mines from a “multilingual source base” (in Ottoman, Bulgarian, Russian, French, and English) that includes government and diplomatic documents, municipal reports, press accounts, memoirs, and personal correspondence (p. 7). In her telling, women and gender were central to the “civilizing” project of the American Board. Analyzing the construction, export, and reception of a discourse of domesticity that promoted the ideal of the “Christian home”—presided over by an educated mother—as the source of both spiritual and societal uplift, she shows how its tenets were reinterpreted and manipulated by individuals (missionaries and converts) as well as the larger communities in which they were embedded. The language of domesticity proved remarkably pliable: it enabled female missionaries, as well as Bulgarian converts, to challenge the gender- and race-based constraints of the male-dominated mission structure; it contributed to a Christian feminist internationalism that would flower after World War I; and it helped fuel “an emergent Orthodox Christian nationalism that countered Protestant influences and thwarted Ottoman efforts to shape a universal Ottoman citizenship” (p. 3).
Reeves-Ellington makes her case in five economical, tightly argued chapters arranged as a series of “encounters” between American missionaries and Bulgarian Orthodox Christians, a structure likely determined in part by the fragmentary nature of her source base. The first examines the concept of the Christian home as a “major focus of mission policy and the missionary wife as the anchor of the missionary endeavor” (p. 23). Used initially by male members of the American Board to justify the participation of women in that endeavor, the discourse of Protestant domesticity also supplied the rationale for a range of activities that female missionaries (married and single) engaged in as an extension of their traditional “housekeeping” duties, including the supervision of boarding schools, the formation of maternal associations, and the writing of advice manuals. Chapter 2, “Education, Conversion, and Bulgarian Orthodox Nationalism,” tells the story of Maria Gencheva, a mission-school graduate whose conversion to Protestantism precipitated an attack on a mission home in Stara Zagora in 1867. Reeves-Ellington analyzes the incident and its fallout for what it reveals about the state of Bulgarian nationalism at a time when Ottoman reformers were seeking to downplay religious differences in the empire in the interest of consolidating a singular Ottoman identity. She identifies a nascent Bulgarian national identity of which religion was a key marker, and whose proponents used the language of domesticity to defend the Bulgarian home against “the dangers of . . . ‘the Protestant propaganda’” (p. 51). In Chapter 3, “The Mission Press and Bulgarian Domestic Reform,” she examines the impact of missionary writings on Bulgarian Orthodox women readers. While most were not persuaded to convert, they were encouraged to envision—and some, to advocate—an expanded role for women in the development of an incipient Bulgarian nation.
Chapters 4 and 5 shift the focus back to missionary society and the internal tensions provoked by challenges to its patriarchal, racialized culture. “Unconventional Couples—Gender, Race, and Power in Mission Politics” recounts the experiences of three single female missionaries and the male Bulgarian pastor whom one of them married as they sought greater professional opportunity and autonomy within a hierarchical structure that deemed women “not quite” missionaries and Bulgarians “not quite” white (p. 138). The changing attitudes about gender, race, and Christianity that they exemplified emerge even more clearly in Chapter 5, where Reeves-Ellington traces their evolution among the faculty at the American College for Girls, who were determined “to be professional educators first, Protestants second, and proselytizers not at all” (p. 173). That determination would lead them to sever the school's relationship with the Woman's Board of Missions back in Boston, an event that contributed to the eventual demise of the Woman's Board and its absorption into the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. As Reeves-Ellington writes, here was a case where “dissent at the periphery, rather than at the center, provoked change at home” (p. 173).
There is much to admire in Domestic Frontiers, not least of which is the succinct elegance of its prose; indeed, the volume's slimness (the text runs a mere 173 pages) belies the scope of its reach. The themes explored here will resonate across several fields of study, including Ottoman history, Bulgarian history, religious and missionary history, the history of American empire, and women's and gender history. By focusing on a relatively understudied region compared, for example, to the Arab domains, Reeves-Ellington expands our understanding of the impact of American missionary activity within the Ottoman Empire. Her deft contextualization of that activity against the backdrop of Tanzimat reforms and rising nationalism among Balkan Christians reveals its role in the “social and religious fragmentation” that beset the empire in the 19th century (p. 4). As a detailed case study of the globalizing ascendance of bourgeois domesticity, moreover, the book is especially welcome. Much has been written about how the ideals that accompanied the reorganization of economic and social life in the industrializing West (companionate marriage, the nuclear family, the division between private and public space, and, most crucially, education for women) found purchase in many different parts of the world, becoming staples of much nationalist discourse (and one might like to have seen a deeper engagement with this work). Reeves-Ellington offers a particularly astute analysis of their transmission on the ground in one local context. Their role in the evolution of feminist internationalism, which she presents tantalizing hints of, certainly warrants further study, although again, more work has been done in this vein than her notes acknowledge (the book unfortunately lacks a bibliography). In short, this is an important book with broad appeal to scholars and students alike, whose brevity and accessible style make it especially attractive for use in the classroom.
