9 thoughts on “Reading Response for Thursday”

1. Gale Kenny’s Contentious Liberties presents an original perspective on abolitionism; her book addresses the movement’s direct effects on the emancipated population of Jamaica. However I think that she focuses more on how the white missionaries adjusted to their new landscape and how each one interpreted and implemented the civilizing mission. Out of what seems like several arguments, I found one particularly interesting: domesticity as a way to judge how “civilized” the Jamaican society was. The characters that Kenny introduced in detail throughout the book made the argument more compelling, as these people provided clear examples to support her theories.

   The missionaries traveled to Jamaica in order to show that recently emancipated former slaves could lead fulfilling lives in a viable community, according to the standards of the white American missionaries. Yet expectations for gender also played a role in the Jamaican Mission. Kenny spends time discussing many interesting women who went to Jamaica. I was surprised at how they were treated by male ministers and other male officials. I think that women like Mary Dean and Sarah Penfield were expecting an environment in Jamaica that was more similar to what was happening in the U.S., or at least in the small realm of the women’s rights movement, where women were beginning to speak publicly about their issues. The male ministers did not approve of women venturing outside of their domestic sphere. Both Dean and Penfield complained that wages for women were less than for men; they had similar grievances about other ways in which women were secondary to the male members of the mission. For their part the men did not appreciate these comments, but disregarded them as bothersome. The personal status of the woman did not make a difference in terms of her social standing or influence, as Kenny makes clear: Dean was single, while Penfield was married. Yet both women felt that their voice was silenced because of their gender.

   The missionaries in Jamaica judged the success of the mission on the economic, religious, and social lives of blacks; they were doing well if they owned land, participated actively in the mission’s church, and did not engage in any sexual or moral misconduct. The missionaries, especially the male ones, also looked at the role of women in the mission society in order to judge their success. Typically the black women did not fit their stereotyped ideal of a woman, as morally superior and part of the domestic sphere; they often had children out of wedlock and did not live with their male partner after having a child. What I found just as interesting was how the white women in Jamaica did not always follow the female ideal, which was already established in the U.S. White women in Jamaica had specific duties and a social role to fill, by supporting their husbands or other male missionaries and setting a moral example for the black women. Kenny shows how the sphere of domesticity was one of the most important features of the civilizing mission, which demonstrated to the white missionaries that they were doing their job well.

2. I found this book to be an interesting and engaging read, particularly because of the way the missionaries were characterized. When I heard in class on Thursday that this book involved a “sex scandal,” I wasn’t overly intrigued because I assumed that whatever was considered a sex scandal in 1850 probably wouldn’t be all that dramatic in 2012. After reading Chapter 4 of this book, I realized I was wrong. This Chapter basically read like a trashy teenage novel. In addition to a sex scandal it was rife with other drama including gossip and a girl fight. I really appreciated the style because of the way it focused on people and plot. It read almost like a novel at times while still being grounded in the main source, the letters.

   Chapter 4 is a good example of the way that the missionaries are portrayed throughout the book. The tone was mainly impartial, but I still felt as though I could discern the conclusions that the author was drawing about each missionary, in particular Mary Dean, who I perceived as a “main character” of sorts. The descriptions of Dean were fairly neutral in tone and the author acknowledged her faults, but I got the impression that the author admired Dean and I did too as I found the subtle argument compelling. I was most intrigued by the female missionaries, which I imagine is not coincidental, as I gathered from the way that the book was structured that the author was also most drawn here. Though the book handled the subject of both race and gender, I found the discussion of gender to be more complete, probably because very few letters exist from black Jamaicans.

   I am fascinated and baffled by the notion that this book was constructed based on letters. While there were certainly references to historiography, it seemed like the letters were the main source of what I found to be the most compelling parts of the book. Chapter 4, for example, is detailing a dramatic episode in which a lot of different people were involved. The final product reads seamlessly, like a narrative. I’m intrigued as to how something like that was built from a bunch of different letters from various authors. I appreciated the letters as the main source because it offered a unique viewpoint. I liked it when the author specifically referenced who was writing the letter and to whom or used specific quotes. I also appreciated it when the limits of letters as a source were used. It is specifically stated several times that this narrative is partially incomplete because there are virtually no letters from missionary wives. There are several other places in the book where the author specified that we cannot be sure of whatever point she was making because there are only one or two letters, which I thought was good because it recognized the limitation of using personal letters as a historical source, which added credibility.

   I liked the way the book was organized chronologically into three different parts. Each part had a summary that detailed what would be covered in the chapters, so the book had a main intro and then three mini intros. I really liked this because it provided context, which helped everything generally make more sense, rather than trying to figure out what the main point of each chapter was as you were reading. Organizationally, the book seemed to build and resolve like one would expect in the novel. I found the beginning to be much more dry and difficult to get through, probably because it was a lot of background, including information I already was familiar with from earlier in the course. Overall, I think the way that the structure, both in terms of parts and chapters and the dramatic build and resolution, contributed to making this book readable and engaging.

   In terms of the argument, I tend to agree with what the author said in class last Thursday. The argument of this book can’t really be summed up neatly in to one sentence; It operates on a much more individualized basis. Neither women nor men of the missionary can be cleanly categorized in terms of thought or behavior on any level. There is a noticeable trend in shifting thought associated on the basis of time and generation, but I think that is the only really identifiable trend. Single women missionaries such as Mary Dean and Urania Hunt certainly cannot be grouped together in either thought or behavior. Nor can they really be categorized with the later single women missionaries that married once on the island. The men are equally difficult to divide into simple categories especially considering the fact that some of the men, such as Wolcott, were in Jamaica for over 20 years and changed considerably over time. The argument of the book developed primarily on a personal and individual basis of the different ministers, which I found refreshing and appropriate since the book was constructed around personal letters.

3. This week’s book was particularly interesting because the class had the opportunity to speak with Gail Kenny about her book before we began to read it. Something that I should note is that before reading this book I had no knowledge of any Abolitionist missionary movement in Jamaica. What struck me and what I will focus on in this blog is the Missionaries large sense of “Christian Justice.”

   Many of the Missionaries wanted to build Jamaica up and empower the Freemen as members of their circle of Christ. The American Missionaries attempted to impose their ideals on the Jamaicans, who frankly were not interested in sharecropping for meager wages nor were they interested in directly accepting the ways of the white abolitionist. Freedmen in Jamaica wanted the same thing that Freedmen in America wanted, to be left alone and to live on their own land to support their families. In the book and in the talk Kenny gave she asserts that this difference of opinion on liberty created many problems for the people trying to live and prosper as Freedmen and Missionaries in Jamaica.

   One source of friction and set back for the Missionaries was the sex scandal that unfolded in Jamaica. There is evidence in Kenny’s book that suggests that the Missionaries had a very libertine attitude towards sex. Often some engaged in wife swapping and other infidelities. Obviously this created increased tension among the Missionaries and the Jamaicans. I believe that this was one of the ultimate betrayals of the Missionaries to the Jamaicans. This scandal was one that let the Jamaicans see the fallacies in what these Americans were preaching. The missionaries stance of teaching and fighting for “Christian Liberty” was undoubtedly undermined as it was considered to pull the Missionaries out of Jamaica. Given that everyone makes mistakes and does not do right all the time, I believe that this indiscretion was too much for the Missionaries to recover from in the perception of the Jamaicans.

   After reading Kenny’s book I found myself asking: “What should have the Missionaries done so that their mission would have been more successful?” after some thinking I believe that the Missionaries should have listened to the wants and needs of the Freedmen. The Missionaries should have acted as Neighbors rather than “New Masters.” And they should have avoided a sex scandal.

4. As we have discussed for many of our books, I am going to address how radical I think the missionaries were.
   The abolitionists that went to Jamaica were more radical than the vast majority of Northerners. These abolitionists believed that the freedmen could be educated to behave like “civilized” whites. These missionaries did not believe that the Jamaicans were inherently incapable of being civilized because of their race which many other whites believed such as the British missionaries on the island. Yet Kenny shows that the abolitionist missionaries have paternalistic attitudes. The missionaries treated the Jamaicans like children, and the men often used harsh discipline. The missionaries tried to closely monitor the behavior of the Jamaicans paying close attention to their sexual behavior. Even the younger generation of abolitionists recognized the paternalism of the older abolitionists and claimed it was similar to that of the slave owners. The only missionary without a paternalistic attitude was John Hyde and his close followers who all eventually abandoned the mission.
   The economic views of the missionaries are difficult to classify by modern standards. They emphasize the need for land ownership so that the Jamaicans felt a sense of responsibility for their work. This idea is traditionally capitalist. Yet another reason that they wanted Jamaican land ownership is because the old slavemasters were charging the freedmen high rent and paying them low wages. This kept the freedmen in poverty.
   I found it interesting that the religion of the abolitionists is what led them to their progressive views when today often very religious people are more conservative.
   I also find it interesting when radicals have to compromise their beliefs. Kenny mentions that the missionaries did not always attack the views of the other sects of Christians on the island for the sake of maintaining peace within the church.

5. In “Contentious Liberties,” Gale Kenney analyzes the AMA Jamaica Mission and the people who organized it in order to look at abolitionist communities and their international experiences – for better or for worse, mostly for worse. Although I enjoyed the book and the wealth of information it provided, each chapter felt almost solitary in its scope, rather than building on a single, clear argument. This format differed from most of the works we read this semester that focused on a single idea and then utilized abolitionist figures to illustrate their point. Still, the argument gradually built through these chapters with increased knowledge of cultural and political issues that affected the Jamaica Mission. Readers are granted an odd form of dramatic irony as it became increasingly clear just how impossible the Jamaica Mission’s success was as the chapters continue building upon past information.

   Kenney took on many diverse issues that affected the Americans in Jamaica including religion, gender, and race. Her analysis of gender roles, in particular, flowed well between chapters and helped established the intergenerational conflicts of the Jamaica Mission. While I generally think of the cult of true womanhood in a British context, Kenney firmly asserted how these ideals manifested themselves in the American evangelist community with women who fully “embraced qualities of true womanhood” (26). These gendered moralistic leanings manifested themselves in the conflict between missionary John Hyde and school teacher Mary Dean. Kanney’s earlier statements on true womanhood come out as Dean asserted “respectability as a woman to serve as a moral beacon and a protector of the mission family” in the midst of Hyde’s questionable life choices (105). Through her uncritical analysis of the cult of domesticity, Kenney establishes gendered conflict as a part of the highly complex issues that plagued the Jamaica Mission.

6. While reading Gale Kenny’s Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866, the missionaries’ rhetoric really struck me. For all their radicalism, and their views on abolitionism, the idea the missionaries held that masculinity was necessary for freedom and being “civilized” really struck me. In Chapter One of the text, Kenny states that “The radicalism of Oberlin’s male students and its obvious attachment to the abolitionist movement was therefore tempered by an emphasis on particular gender roles….Oberlin’s early faculty and students did not promote sexual equality” (39-40). She then goes on to describe the many ways women were limited in a gender-based way at Oberlin.

   This belief really exemplified, on a more subtle level, how hypocritical their views were, and how oppressive their strict views of freedom were not only for black Jamaicans, but for their own people. This emphasis on individual liberty, but stringent rules regarding “sexual purity, womanly submission, and religious discipline” obviously did not resound with them as another form of bondage and oppression. In this regard, the patriarchy takes precedent over any ideas of freedom and liberty. And quite ironically, this brings to mind how the idea of masculinity was used as a way to justify slaves being under a slave master’s dominion. How a slave holder was seen as the “father” and slaves –regardless of sex – were infantilized, thus stripping male slaves of their own sense of masculinity, leaving them and their families powerless to a slave holder’s will. The Christian gender hierarchy and the slave holder’s picturesque metaphor of slavery are startlingly similar, and surely the Christian abolitionists must have been aware of such rhetoric.

   In this sense, John Hyde and Mary Dean play such interesting roles in the text. They both push against this male-centric Christian orthodoxy. While John Hyde’s sexual license and aversion for authoritarianism is what seems to oppose the mission men’s hierarchical sense of order, it was Dean’s persistent denouncement of Hyde that caused her to upset the social order. And yet, while Hyde’s actions are much more scandalous and radical, it is Dean who is still chastised by the mission men, even while she is defending the morality of the mission from the licentiousness of Hyde.

7. The part of the book that I found most interesting (and I suspect I am not alone in this) was the scandal surrounding the Hydes, the Evarts, and Urania Hunt. In class we’ve talked about the various reasons that studying abolitionists can be useful, and one of these ways is to explore what was possible for someone to think during a certain time period, and, as I think this book makes clear, cultural and social context. Kenny draws several parallels between the paternalism of the plantation masters and the abolitionists, though with the caveat that the actions of the Americans “grew out of a genuine, albeit racialized, concern to save the souls of freed people whom they believed were being led astray by black Baptists.” For instance, in the same way that white plantation owners in Jamaica were frustrated by the fact that ex-slaves could now leave plantations in search of better wages or land of their own, the missionaries were frustrated by the fact that Jamaican blacks could just change to a different church if they were excommunicated by the missionaries. By pointing this out I don’t in any way seek to place the missionaries in the same moral category as slaveholders; rather, I think it just reveals a prevailing mindset that was to some degree shared between even whites with a very different political outlook. Hyde’s actions and beliefs, while not without precedent, are therefore very interesting because they at least initially seemed to transcend the sort of rigidity that Christian perfectionists and plantation owners shared. Reading about abolitionists, who, at least on a very basic level, tried to change the world in the direction of “modernity”, provokes very different assumptions and biases than reading about someone like Hyde who advocated values (albeit hypocritically) that were less rigid than our society’s own. Hyde also managed to attract the backing of a lot of the missionaries on the island.
   As Kenny makes clear, this episode is also very interesting because it displays the complex role that gender played in the missionary community. When Mary Dean attacked Hyde she was rebuked despite the fact that many people initially agreed with her, and when the missionaries met to resolve the situation they focused on the problems with Dean and Hunt and essentially ignored Hyde’s central role in stirring up trouble. Thus, it seems, regarding both gender and race, the white male missionaries were prone to stop advocating equality when it became a threat to their authority. Hyde, while more libertine in some respects, was also susceptible to this and beat his wife to control her, and if Hyde was on the ‘frontier of what was possible to think (then or now)’, this was surely a great limitation.

8. The picture that author Gale Kenny paints for us in her book Contentious Liberties is a narrowly focused examination of a single endeavor that speaks volumes about both the methods and beliefs held by many American abolitionists. While the narrative is centered around the American Missionary Society’s efforts to spread their values to the people of Jamaica, what we learn most about through Kenny’s research is the American missionaries themselves; specifically in respect to their naïve and ultimately ineffective methods as well as the divisions between one another that served to undermine them.
   In Part 2 of Kenny’s book we get a real sense of the parental and somewhat superior attitude the American missionaries adopted in their dealings with the natives. They completely ignored Jamaican culture and history assuming that the locals were akin to children who were in need of only instruction and guidance to assimilate into the AMA’s plans for their mission. When these methods of instruction failed, rather than the missionaries evaluating their own actions (which may have identified their ignorance of Jamaican sociopolitical and cultural customs) in an effort to improve, they shifted the blame of their failures to the very locals they were trying to help by implementing more controlling or authoritarian measures in their congregations. I found this approach to be extremely arrogant of the missionaries, a view which younger missionaries seemed to agree with as they accused their older counterparts as emulating the behaviors of slaveholders in their endeavors to ‘civilize’ the population.
   In Part 3 of the book, these clashes of ideologies between the AMA’s own missionaries continued and multiplied – counteracting any good that may have been accomplished, until the mission was given up altogether. For me, the AMAs actions in Jamaica illustrate that abolitionists were not above a fatal pitfall common to many such ‘civilizing’ missions undertaken throughout history, namely the combination of ignorance and powerful convictions.

9. In Gale Kenny’s Contentious Liberties, Kenny could have easily discussed only the perspective of the Oberlin College’s missionaries. Especially, when we consider that much of her historical sources are from the correspondences of the missionaries and their accounts, we may even get the false impression that the book is only dedicated to telling the history from the Jamaican missionaries’ perspective.

   However, I believe that Kenny successfully depicts from both the perspectives of the Jamaicans and American missionaries. Her success is mainly due to the fact that she gives extensive context of the Jamaican conceptions of religion, freedom, and slavery in Chapter 2.

   In Chapter 2, Kenny discusses the Jamaicans’ native religion, Myal, and how Myal “emphasized the community’s well-being rather than the state of an individual soul” (p.51). Furthermore, Myal fostered a sense of pluralism within the heterogeneous Black community in Jamaica. Also, Kenny describes the spread of Baptism in Jamaica, and the rise of “black Baptists”—who rather than following the strict definition of Christianity of the “white Baptists,” proselytized Christianity accommodating to the Jamaican conceptions of religion.

   In terms of freedom, Jamaicans viewed freedom to be the end of the systemic and political control of the slave owners (p.56). This directly contrasted with the AMA missionaries’ definition of freedom, which meant the furthering of their Protestant ideals. Furthermore, their conception of religion collided with Jamaican pluralism, as their religion was more individual-based and exclusive.

   As Kenny describes the struggles and conflicts the missionaries face with the Jamaicans in the later chapters, we are able to see the struggle from both points of view, in part due to Kenny’s dedication to the contextual descriptions of Jamaican religion and freedom.

   Kenny said in class on Tuesday that her book cannot be described under one unified theme, and certain costs come from straying from this traditional historical narrative technique. However, I think that because she was so committed in giving all aspects of the history American abolitionists in Jamaica, including extensive contextual evidence, she successfully showed that “the Jamaica Mission acted more like a crucible, testing the beliefs and practices of all of its participants” (p. 209).