Barbara Reeves-Ellington. Domestic Frontiers: Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East, 1831-1908. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013. 214 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-55849-981-2; $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-55849-980-5.
Reviewed by Karen Phoenix
Published on H-SHGAPE (June, 2015)
Commissioned by Julia Irwin (University of South Florida)
American Cultural Expansion in the Late Ottoman Near East
In Domestic Frontiers, Barbara Reeves-Ellington examines the work of Protestant missionaries in the Ottoman Balkans (Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Thrace) during the nineteenth century. Missionaries used domesticity—both the language of domesticity and the physical home itself—to attempt to convert Eastern Orthodox Christians (they focused on fellow Christians because in the Ottoman Empire, Muslims who converted to Christianity were guilty of apostasy and were thus subject to reprisal including being put to death). Through a series of case studies, Reeves-Ellington explores the ways that Protestant missionaries imbued the home with distinctly American ideals, including women’s moral authority, and American racial, cultural, and religious hierarchies. Her central argument is that the missionaries’ concept of home was both challenged and changed by the demands of two groups. First, local Bulgarians conceptualized the home, society, and the nation (and the role of women within these spheres) from a nationalist perspective. While they took up missionaries call for women’s education, they combined this with Eastern Orthodoxy to create a women’s patriotism, and rejected the missionaries’ emphasis on Protestantism. Second, towards the end of the century, “new” women missionaries from the United States brought their own ideas of the role of single women within the mission field. These women sought to broaden the definition of the “home” beyond the “white,” nuclear family, and to extend their own authority as professionals and independent women who were not subordinate to male missionaries.
Reeves-Ellington begins by discussing the ways that the missionary idealized home was modeled on their New England roots. In this, the wife/mother created a safe and comfortable space, which insulated the inhabitants from outside concerns. In a mission context, the primary task of wives was to protect and nurture their husbands and take care of the home and family. In their remaining time, women could contribute to the mission as teachers, particularly teaching local girls in domestic arts that would create Christian homes. In reality, first-generation missionary wives complained of their struggles to raise children within an Eastern Orthodox environment (which they viewed as a corrupt), and the additional duties of mission boarding schools. In contrast, second-generation missionary wives were generally older and some had professional careers as teachers before they were married. For these women, mission work outside the home was a key part of their duties, even if that meant hiring domestic servants to take care of their own homes.
In chapters 2 and 3, Reeves-Ellington turns to the relationship between the missionaries and Bulgarian Orthodox Christians. Although both groups were Christian, Protestant conversion challenged the existing Bulgarian Orthodox community identity, particularly because Bulgarian nationalists were attempting to tie nationalism to the Orthodox Church. For example, Protestant missionaries advocated women’s literacy so that women would be able to read the Bible, and therefore started a mission school for girls. While Bulgarians initially supported the school, they soon became concerned about Protestant indoctrination. For their part, missionaries hoped the school girls would become good wives for male converts, and would encourage Protestant conversion in the community (while simultaneously staying within what the missionaries viewed as their subordinate racial and cultural position). Rather than becoming Protestant, however, Bulgarian women who read mission publications “combined strains of American domesticity, Ottoman reform, and Bulgarian nationalism” and began to demand education for their daughters (p. 79). Bulgarian women redeployed ideas that presented the elevated women’s status in the United States, while they rejected Protestantism. Bulgarian nationalists therefore used the women’s education and domestic duties to construct an ideal woman who was an Orthodox Bulgarian nationalist.
In chapters 4 and 5, Reeves-Ellington turns back to the fractures within the missionary community. She first examines the conflict between Esther Maltbie and Anna Mumford, two American missionary women who were single and decided to set up a household together, and the rest of the mission. When Maltbie and Mumford asked the Tonjoroffs, an Anglo-Bulgarian couple to stay with them, it disrupted the other missionaries’ sense of gender and racial hierarchy. The other missionaries struck back at Maltbie and Mumford and accused the women of being unfit for their posts, focusing particularly on their administration of the mission school for girls. The Tonjoroffs reveal the racism of missionaries vis-à-vis Bulgarians because they were a “mixed-race” couple (Ivan Tonjoroff was a convert and “native pastor”). Reeves-Ellington also explains the subordinate positions of male converts who, like Tonjoroff, did not have equal status within the hierarchy of mission governance.
Chapter 5 completes the generational change of the mission, as Reeves-Ellington illustrates through the Constantinople Home. The Constantinople Home was a women’s enterprise, financed by the Women’s Board of Missions, and led and run by women. Officers within the school strongly advocated for their own authority against the men of the mission, who wanted to keep women in subordinate administrative positions. Over time, the power struggle between the younger single women administrators at the school and the older male missionaries (and even some of the earlier school leaders) created a rift between the two groups. Combined with the broader trend into a more ecumenical framework for missions, the end result was that the school became the American College for Girls in Constantinople, an institution that was more responsive to both the local conditions in the Ottoman Empire and the changed demographic among missionaries.
This is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to the fields of women’s history, missionary history, and the United States abroad. Reeves-Ellington’s use of Bulgarian language sources gives US readers an insight into the local politics that is groundbreaking and extends our understanding of how missions were perceived by local people. The connections that she traces between the United States and Near East illustrate the transnational connections that persisted in missionaries’ perceptions and thinking. The disconnect between new, single women missionaries in the post-Civil War period and the missionaries already in Istanbul complicates the work of classics such as Jane Hunter’s The Gospel of Gentility (1989). In short, Domestic Frontiers offers an excellent analysis of US Protestant missionaries in the Near East and will be of interest to a wide range of scholars.
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Citation:
Karen Phoenix. Review of Reeves-Ellington, Barbara, Domestic Frontiers: Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East, 1831-1908.
H-SHGAPE, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38723
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