"Providence Has Freed Our Hands": Women's Missions and the American Encounter with Japan.

Ishii, Noriko Kawamura

"Providence Has Freed Our Hands": Women's Missions and the American Encounter with Japan. By Karen K. Seat. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. xvii + 193 pp. $22.95 cloth.

The transnational reappraisal of American history during the past two decades has revived scholarly attention to the American women's foreign missionary movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The historian Ian Tyrrell had warned that the past scholarship in transnational perspective tended to emphasize the transatlantic perspective and repeatedly called for more scholarship on the transpacific perspective. He further argued in 2007 that the transpacific perspective was a promising framework because "American involvement in the Pacific in the nineteenth century was part of a global outlook" and would thus produce "a new way of conceptualizing American history as a whole" ("Looking Eastward: Pacific and Global Perspectives on American History in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," The Japanese Journal of American Studies 18 [2007]: 42).

Seat's book appeared in a timely fashion as an important addition to such growing scholarship. Seat explores the story of Elizabeth Russell, an exemplary woman missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church who sailed to Japan in 1879 and founded a progressive girls' school--Kwassui Jo Gakko in Nagasaki--during the turbulent Meiji period. Japan was rapidly modernizing to seek parity with Western powers at that time. Unlike other studies that explore the origins of the women's missionary movement and the contents of the missionary work in the foreign fields, Seat focuses her work on how the missionary experience in Japan transformed Russell's outlook on gender and race and suggests the possible impact of such transformation on American Protestantism and on American culture at large. Building on the arguments of postcolonial theorists such as Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Seat claims that the global encounters of American missions in the late nineteenth century were important "sites of American cultural production" and that such missionary experience "triggered new discourses in the United States regarding gender and race" (xiii, xvi).

Overall, Seat develops a well-balanced argument based on this framework. By combining a wide array of secondary literature with the primary sources of Elizabeth Russell's writings and the monthly missionary magazine published by the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS) of the Methodist Episcopal Church, titled The Heathen Woman's Friend (renamed Woman's Missionary Friend in 1896), Seat examines Russell's changing perceptions of gender and race as she developed Kwassui Jo Gakko. By portraying Russell's struggle with both the Japanese government and other Methodist Episcopal Church missionaries in northern and eastern Japan, Seat reveals the more complicating construction of gender ideology in modernizing Japan. She further attempts to connect Russell's case study to the larger question of how foreign missionary experiences broadened and liberated the Protestant ideology on gender and race. Within this attempt lie both the strengths and the weaknesses of Seat's work.

First, on the transformation of Russell's gender ideology, Seat successfully situates Russell's ideas and nature to what she inherited from her mentors in her educational background, namely Emma Willard and Sarah Foster Hannah, who founded Troy Seminary and Washington Female Seminary respectively. Inheriting the consistent quality of "great self-assurance" from these mentors (27), Russell sought the highest standard and the best location for women's higher education during its most difficult times. Hence, Kwassui Jo Gakko became the only missionary girls' school in Japan to incorporate Latin and Greek into the curriculum. The argument on the ideological connection was convincing because the three figures actually knew one another, and Seat successfully identifies the ideological thread that weaves them together. Seat's argument about the spiritual origins of Russell's motivation is equally convincing. In addition, Seat demonstrates in readable and lucid writing that the foreign missionary experience liberated and expanded the women missionaries' gender roles. Yet, when it comes to the discussion of the impact of Russell's transformed ideologies of gender and race on American Protestantism at large, the connections seem haphazard and fail to show the underlying thread that links the transmission of ideas.

Russell was an exemplary figure, sometimes at odds with WFMS missionaries in northern and eastern Japan. Instead of discussing why Russell's thoughts and strategies contrasted sharply with those of other WFMS missionaries, Seat seeks to connect Russell's ideas with those of Helen Barrett Montgomery, the president of the Woman's American Baptist Foreign Mission Society who was considered the principal spokeswoman of the women's mission movement and a major proponent of women's rights. Seat claims that "the WFMS heavily promoted the work of Helen Barrett Montgomery" (146). Nonetheless, it is a leap in logic to generalize and identify the gender ideologies of Russell and Montgomery as a significant transformation of the gender ideology of American Protestantism and American culture at large.

Second, another hallmark of this study is how Seat captures the subtle transitions Russell makes in her ideas about race through her experience as the mother of her adopted Japanese daughter, May Russell. Compared with incidents in China--the case of Gertrude Howe, for example, who trained some of the first Chinese female missionary doctors--missionary adoptions of Japanese girls have rarely been documented in previous scholarship. Seat argues that Russell "transcended her ethnocentrism" through this experience (117). Russell sent May to the United States at the age of eleven to train her to be her protege and successor, but it failed as May died before Russell's own death.

Drawing on Russell's writings and Joseph Henning's work, Seat connects this argument to the larger question of the changing perceptions of "race," "heathenism," and "civilization." Again, the book falls short of showing the impact of an individual's transformed ideology of race on the racial ideology of American culture at large. Yet the discussion provokes new perspectives and insights for a comparative study on adoption and missionary work.

Seat's book is a well-written, provocative, and valuable addition to the growing literature on transnational history of the women's foreign missionary movement.

doi: 10.1017/S0009640709990813

Noriko Kawamura Ishii

Otsuma Women's University