“A Hewer of Wood and Drover of Water”: Expectations of Protestant Missionary Women on the Western Frontiers of Canada and the United States, 1830–1900
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1820 and 1900, women represented approximately thirty per cent of the missionaries sent to western Canada, the majority married to other missionaries. During the same period, women comprised sixty per cent of the Protestant missionaries sent to Indian missions in the western United States.1 Over half of the women in US mission work were single and unrelated to other members of the mission.2 To the male-dominated Protestant missionary societies, women represented the embodiment of Christian womanhood: pious protectors of home, hearth, and the private sphere. But missionary women viewed their role differently. Better educated than the average woman in Canada or the United States, and often more educated than their male counterparts, females joined the missionary movement because missionary societies portrayed their work as a liberating and more public extension of Christian womanhood (Wills 253–55).3Therefore, missionary women hoped to use their education to advance Christianity and to extend the role of the Christian woman. Once they arrived on the frontier, though, they found that mission work offered simply the same traditional roles of wife, helpmate, mother, and nurse but in a different locale. By examining Protestant missionary societies’ expectations for women and missionary women’s own expectations of mission work, this paper studies how missionary women struggled with these expectations when they conflicted with actual experience on the frontier. It compares female and male missionaries’ descriptions of native women to examine the conflicts in missionary women’s lives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".