Women and the White Man's God: Gender and Race in the Canadian Mission Field

Kerry Abel is a professor of history at Carleton University. She is the author of Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History, co-editor of Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada: Historical and Legal Aspects, and co-editor of Northern Visions: New Perspectives on the North in Canadian History.

Gender and imperialism are hot topics among scholars at the moment.
Here, historian Myra Rutherdale tries to strike a balance between some
of the more extreme generalizations of the culture studies theorists and
a careful reading of the historical record. Her study of the ideas of
gender and empire as reflected in the lives and work of Anglican
missionaries in northern British Columbia, Yukon, and the Arctic from
1860 to 1940 is a well-researched and useful contribution both to our
knowledge of the history of the Canadian North and to our understanding
of how the British Empire attempted to establish itself in this corner
of the world.

The book actually conveys both more and less than the title promises.
It is about gender—both masculinity and femininity—not just about
women in mission work. Indeed, one of the best sections of the book is
an exploration of masculinity and the Church Missionary Society. Ideas
about race are less well developed, and the book covers only one
denomination and a few dioceses of the “mission field.”
Nevertheless, the reader is introduced to the subtleties and ambiguities
of relations between men and women, and those between Aboriginal peoples
and Europeans, in an effective way. The boundaries of categories like
gender and empire were flexible and permeable, according to Rutherdale,
not the rigid dichotomies proposed by the major theorists in the field.

While the book does not provide dramatic new insight into the topic, it
is a solid, useful, and well-modulated contribution to a dialogue that
has tended at times to overly dramatic and extreme exchanges.