Abstract
At first glance, a reader may assume that Gale Kenny's book is an indictment of White conservative Protestant women rather than White progressive Protestant women. Kenny argues that since the founding of missionary societies in the 1870s until quite recently, there was not such a clear binary among White Protestant denominations as there is now. In this book, she challenges the idea that ecumenical Protestant women were “progressive” by showing how their activism drew on racist and xenophobic assumptions in their quest to bring about the kingdom of God on earth (Matthew 6:10).
Kenny argues that even with their limited authority White Protestant women played a central role in shaping religious, racial, and gendered hierarchies through their missionary and ecumenical activities from the late 19th to the mid-twentieth century. She sheds light on how gender advocacy was historically intertwined with imperial and racial hierarchies. While advocating for women's rights and racial cooperation, White Protestant women reinforced imperialist power structures by positioning themselves as moral and spiritual leaders over non-White and non-Protestant communities in the United States and abroad.
Christian imperial feminism is not a new term. Kenny uses it to illustrate that White Protestant missionary women participated in empire by claiming their own political power in a male-dominated religion, by making assumptions and claims that “ethnic religions” were patriarchal and could benefit from the intervention of cosmopolitan White Protestant women, and by asserting that their feminine qualities would create a harmonious and diverse world that would embody Christ's kingdom on earth.
In her archival research, Kenny applies lenses of feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories to show how missionary women positioned themselves as both liberators and moral authorities over non-Western women and contributed to a racialized understanding of modernity and progress. Through historical analysis of archival materials such as missionary periodicals, textbooks, meeting minutes, speeches, pamphlets, correspondence, and organizational reports, Kenny challenges the idea that ecumenical Protestant women were progressive.
Kenny's thematic chapter-by-chapter analysis enables her to highlight continuities and transformations in Christian imperial feminism over time. Chapter 1, “Christian Imperial Feminism and Mission Study,” illustrates how White Protestant women in the early twentieth century developed a distinct form of religious activism through the United Mission Study program, which included textbooks that framed non-Christian religions as oppressive to women, thereby justifying the expansion of Protestant missions as a form of both religious and gender liberation. Chapter 2, “Performing Christian Imperial Feminism in Missionary Pageants,” explores how White Protestant women used theatrical pageants and skits to dramatize and reinforce their missionary efforts (patriotic pageants were common during the early twentieth century). The missionary pageants and skits served not only as entertainment but also as training for White Protestant women who saw themselves as moral and religious leaders in a global Christian empire. Chapter 3, “Learning to Cooperate by Cooperating,” explores how White Protestant women redefined their missionary work from “traditional” missions to broader social reform efforts, including interracial cooperation and Christianizing social relations. In the case of White Protestant women, cooperation became a bureaucratic strategy and a religious practice, reinforcing the women's moral authority in shaping national and global racial and religious policies. Chapter 4, “Christian Americanization and the Tri-Faith Movement,” illustrates how White Protestant women used Christian Americanization programs to assimilate immigrants and reinforce their own moral and cultural dominance. While these programs included cooperation with Jewish and Catholic leaders, they centered Protestantism as the guiding force in shaping American identity. Chapter 5, “The Spiritual Feelings and Religious Politics of Interracial Cooperation,” examines how White Protestant women approached interracial cooperation as an opportunity to feel more spiritual, while Black Protestant women saw it as an opportunity to gain support for their political activism, especially in advocating for anti-lynching legislation, domestic workers’ rights, and the desegregation of public places including hospitals and hotels, restaurants, and other venues where the former missionaries, now churchwomen, held their conferences and conventions. Chapter 6, “Christian Citizens, World Citizens,” explores how churchwomen in the 1930s and 1940s integrated political activism with religious practice in institutions like the YWCA and the United Nations and in peace movements and world prayer services to envision a postwar Christian world order.
The book expands feminist theory, which often focuses on secular feminism, by showing how Christian feminism shaped global women's rights movements. With its very detailed (at times perhaps overly detailed) analysis and academic focus, the main audience for the book includes historians and scholars of religion, feminism and gender studies, postcolonial studies, and American studies, but the book, especially chapters four and five, could be of great interest to those in the field of social work. It highlights the historical foundations of social work and missionary work via settlement and neighborhood houses and Americanization programs for recent immigrants. Each chapter prompts contemporary readers to examine how their own well-meaning interventions may reinforce existing power dynamics. In her conclusion, Kenny suggests that the legacy of Christian imperial feminism continues to shape liberal Protestant engagement with diversity and inclusion in ways that maintain underlying racial and imperialist power dynamics. Kenny's critique of benevolent organizations of the past can help feminists today reflect critically on philanthropy, humanitarian work, and global feminisms.
