Professional Documents
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Woman S Missionary Movement and Female Education
Woman S Missionary Movement and Female Education
MISSIONARIES OF MODERNITY:
A Thesis in
Sociology
by
Kerby Goff
of the Requirements
Master of Arts
August 2019
ii
The thesis of Kerby Goff was reviewed and approved* by the following:
Roger Finke
Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Religious Studies, and International Affairs
Director of the Association of Religion Data Archives (theARDA.com)
Thesis Adviser
David Baker
Professor of Sociology, Education, and Demography
Nancy Luke
Associate Professor of Sociology and Demography
Charles Seguin
Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Data Analytics
Abstract
Traditional explanations of the expansion of female mass education outside the West tend
to privilege state and elite actors, ignoring local actors and female actors. While theories of
educational expansion identify the impact of social movements in the U.S. and England,
theoretical and empirical research has failed to test this outside the West. An overlooked
movement concerned with expanding female education was the Woman’s Missionary Movement
of the late 19th century. As part of the Protestant missionary movement, the largest movement of
non-state modern actors in the world, it mobilized tens of thousands of female Protestant
missionaries to extend female education in over 140 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America
by the early 20th century. Drawing on the history of the movement, I demonstrate its similarity to
19th century expansion in the U.S. and England in terms of motivation, methods, and
2010 in 76 non-Western countries, I find that the number of female Protestant missionaries and
the years of exposure to Protestant missions predict higher female primary enrollments, net of 24
alternative explanatory measures and pre-WWII enrollment levels. I find that the number of
missionary secondary schools and the years of exposure to Protestant missions predicts higher
enrollment levels.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES
LIST OF TABLES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This thesis would not be possible were it not for the painstaking work of Harlan Beach
and Charles Fahs to collect missionary data in the late 19th and early 20th century, and for Bob
Woodberry’s work in digitizing the data for his dissertation and subsequent publications. I am
grateful to my advisor, Roger Finke, for his encouragement to pursue this topic and to my
committee for their advice and feedback. I am especially grateful to my wife Meagin for her
How did modern institutions spread from the West to the rest of the world, and what does
gender have to do with it? I examine this question with respect to a primary institution in modern
education. Scholars have noted mass education’s central role in constituting the modern nation-
state (Ramirez and Boli 1987), and gender egalitarianism and increased levels of education go
hand-in-hand as societies modernize (Inglehart and Norris 2003). The expansion of mass
education is marked by convergence towards gender parity with increasing levels of female
education in nearly every society over the past 50 years (Bradley and Ramirez 1996; Cole and
Geist 2018).1 Yet, much of this prior research overlooks two important sources of these changes.
both local actors and female actors. Instead, the focus remains on the top-down efforts of
1
Gender parity in primary and secondary is well established on average at the global
level, and the number of countries with gender parity has risen to 62 as of 2015 (UNESCO
2015). That this establishment of gender parity is now assumed is evidenced by how some World
Bank demographers have labeled gender parity as a “low standard” of success in education
country differences in current levels of education. In this study, I consider between country
2
colonial governments, emerging nation-states, and the world polity or on the diffuse influence of
universal cultural norms (Boli, Ramirez, and Meyer 1985). Moreover, most cross-national
research focuses on the latter half of the 20th century, even though both the expansion of and
demand for schools for girls were established throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America well
before the first World War. In short, traditional explanations for the spread of female education
pay little attention to its pre-WWII origins and give little attention to local and female actors.
There are several reasons that researchers on female educational expansion overlook
local and female actors. With respect to local actors, research on gendered educational expansion
prior to WWII focuses mostly on the suffrage and abolition movements but ignores important
expansion. Additionally, even though researchers point to both social movement actors and state
actors in traditional explanations, they assume social movement actors only had significant
impact on education in the U.S. and England (Boli et al. 1985; Meyer et al. 1979).
One reason scholars of educational expansion have overlooked the impact of female
actors is due to a singular focus on political and secular women’s movements. In this study, I
introduce one overlooked manifestation of the international women’s movement, the Woman’s
Missionary Movement (Montgomery 1910) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As part of
the Protestant missionary movement, they formed the largest movement of non-state modern
actors in the world at the time. The Woman’s Missionary Movement transformed Protestant
missions to become overwhelmingly female by the end of the 19th century, and one of their
differences in current levels based on a mechanism of early expansion that is overlooked, female
Protestant missionaries.
3
central strategies was the expansion of female education wherever they went. Female Protestant
missionaries, most of whom were single, were the direct beneficiaries of education’s expansion
in the West. Though the movement retained traditional Victorian gender norms and failed to
expunge paternalistic and racist attitudes, they were motivated by many of the same religious,
humanitarian, and progressive ideals that had prompted female educational expansion in the U.S.
and England. They sought to provide social uplift for non-Western women, influence society
through educating future mothers, and fulfill their own vocational goals in ways not available
back home. These missionaries also lobbied mission societies, colonial governments, local
leaders, and parents to expand schools for girls, and they enabled later expansion by training
indigenous teachers. Given that expanding education requires significant infrastructure and
social momentum, we should expect that those countries in which female Protestant missionaries
were more active would have a head start and therefore show higher overall levels of female
I propose that the Woman’s Missionary Movement was a key source of the
institutionalization of female education in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Given that female
Protestant missionaries established schooling for girls well before the development of most
nation-states and the world polity, I will test whether their efforts provide a more robust
explanation for the expansion of female education than these traditional explanations. While
some have estimated the impact of Protestant missionaries on education at the sub-national level
in Sub-Saharan Africa using missionary station location information (Fourie and Swanepoel
2015; Gallego and Woodberry 2010; Lankina and Getachew 2013; Nunn 2014), no one has
analyzed this at the cross-national level using personnel data disaggregated by gender. Further,
most studies of the long-run impact of colonial Protestant missionaries pays no attention to either
4
the gender of the missionaries or the Woman’s Missionary Movement. As the Woman’s
expansion.
This study proceeds in six sections. In the first and second sections, I review the
traditional accounts female educational expansion and identify several shortcomings of these
traditional explanations. In the third section I develop the alternative case of expansion by female
Protestant missionaries by examining the motivational and educational milieu of the Woman’s
Missionary Movement, and I suggest several mechanisms by which their expansion could have
produced long term trends. In the fourth section I present the data, analytic method, and the
results. I follow in the final two sections with a discussion of the findings and a conclusion,
considering implications for our understanding of the spread of female education outside of the
West.
Chapter 2
female education, point to the education of girls and women in functional terms—supporting
societal and labor market differentiation as industrialization brings women into the labor force—
or in terms of group competition—status groups extending education to their own girls to gain
competitive advantage over other groups (Boli et al. 1985; Collins 1971; Inglehart and Norris
2003; Schultz 1961). Similarly, other explanations emphasize the role of elites expanding
education to certain elite girls to maintain class dominance (Bowles and Gintis 1976). Still other
explanations highlight the role of the state in socializing girls through education to maintain
social control, develop citizenship and shape future citizen-mothers compete in the world system,
or maintain legitimacy through aligning with modern global gender norms (Berkovitch and
Bradley 1999; Fuller and Rubinson 1992; Ramirez and Boli 1987). While these explanations do
account for important factors in the expansion of female education, and mass education in
1. Focusing on the role of political regimes and elites ignores the role of local actors and
women. Traditional explanations, by virtue of their emphasis on political regimes and elites,
overlook local and social movement actors and privilege male agency. Even though early
theoretical explanations pointed to the role of both social movement actors and elite and state
actors in expanding mass education (Boli et al. 1985), most of the empirical research ignores
social movement actors and female actors (Benavot and Riddle 1988; Bradley and Ramirez
1996; Cole and Geist 2018; Meyer et al. 1977; Meyer, Ramirez, and Soysal 1992). Even when
6
social movement actors are emphasized, no mention is made of the role of female actors (Meyer
et al. 1979). Other research has demonstrated the importance of female actors in documenting the
egalitarian gender attitudes (Berkovitch and Bradley 1999; Pandian 2018; Paxton, Hughes, and
Green 2006), not to mention the earlier role of women’s movements on abolition, suffrage, and
temperance (Berkovitch 1999; Gusfield 1955). Yet, research on the expansion of mass education
for women has failed to consider the role of female social movement actors.
earlier sources of its institutionalization. The difference between expansion prior to and
expansion post-WWII within Asia, Africa and Latin America is attributed to global structural
and cultural forces that coalesced at the end of WWII. However, little attention is given to how
these top-down forces built upon and organized earlier development. Some such as Benavot and
Riddle (1988) have specifically accounted for the effect of different colonial regimes on pre-
WWII expansion, and others have broadened this categorization to various types of location in
the world system viz-a-viz core world polity powers (Meyer et al. 1992) in analyzing expansion
up to 1980. However, whereas the first fails to analyze specific colonial regime effects on later
expansion, both fail to account for pre-WWII actors other than political elites. While Benavot
and Riddle’s treatment of colonial origins reveals that an open market for voluntary expansion
was associated with educational expansion, there is no exploration of the mechanism or actors
7
within these open educational markets.3 Voluntary expansion for nation-building, social uplift,
and religious progress was essential in the early expansion of female education in the U.S. and
Great Britain (Meyer et al. 1979), yet this mechanism has yet to be tested in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America.
Sources of female education’s early institutionalization are not fully assessed. Mass
legitimation, and it is a costly institution that requires infrastructure and incentives. The
legitimation process requires multiple diffusion paths, persistent attempts at diffusion and
institutionalization, and significant resonance with broader cultural frames (Colyvas and Jonsson
2011; Goldberg and Stein 2018; Kaufman and Patterson 2005). Prior patterns of elite education,
initial colonial resistance to mass education, inequality in access to colonial education among
different ethnic groups, and traditional gender norms and practices were significant early barriers
to the institutionalization of mass female education with consequences for later development
(Bradley and Ramirez 1996; Cole and Geist 2018; De Haas and Frankema 2018; Gallego and
Woodberry 2010; Whitehead 1981; Woodberry 2004). Some identify economic development and
institutionalization (Boli et al. 1985; LeVine, LeVine, and Schnell 2001), but a full assessment of
3
It should be noted that Meyer et al (1992) do not find statistical associations between
some categories of colonization and enrollment ratios during this early period, however they
3. Focusing on the top-down effect of world culture norms and modernization trends
ignores the agency and complex motivations of local actors, particularly religious actors. While
mass education is a modern and modernizing institution and gender equality is central to the
modern mindset, the development and expansion of modern institutions has often come through
“traditional” actors. One thinks of the Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the religious motivations
and networks of the abolition movement. However, more recently, others have noted the
centrality of religious motivation and religious actors in the civil rights movement (Morris 1986),
in the social service institution-building of the Salvation Army or the Muslim Brotherhood
(Davis and Robinson 2012), or in the development of autonomous, rational, individual agency
(in contrast to secular NGO’s) in Malawi (Swidler 2013). Furthermore, even “traditional” non-
egalitarian customs such as the “brideprice”4 can contribute to the expansion of modern female
education (Ashraf et al. Forthcoming). While early research on the expansion of female
education in the U.S. also pointed to “traditional” motivations, i.e. religious motivations, later
4
The brideprice is “typically considered to be the payment a husband owes to a bride’s
parents for the right to her labor and reproductive capabilities,” as opposed to the dowry, which
is a transfer of wealth from the bride’s family to the husband upon marriage (Anderson
2007:158). Though the brideprice does not traditionally vary by the wealth or status of the family
(Anderson 2007), the expansion of female education has been associated with higher bride prices
based on the status and perceived earning potential of educated brides (Ashraf et al.
Forthcoming).
9
In the section that follows, I present the Woman’s Missionary Movement and the work of
illustrate the ways in which female Protestant missionaries expanded female education and
propose mechanisms for the persistent effects of their efforts. Previous theory identifies pre-
WWII education levels and post-WWII state-driven initiatives and world polity influences as the
only factors influencing the expansion of female education outside of the West. If including the
educational work of social movement actors, i.e. female Protestant missionaries, explains
variation in female education levels that these other mechanisms do not, then we must conclude
that similar mechanisms of expansion were present in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as were
The Woman’s Missionary Movement was the largest grassroots movement of women in
the world at the turn of the 20th century, and their primary task in spreading the Christian Gospel
was the education of girls and the uplift of women around the world (Murray 2000; Reeves-
Ellington 2011; Robert 1996, 2004). They pursued similar ideals of universal sisterhood, the
uplift of women, the betterment of society, individual agency, and the opening up of the
professions to women, as did other women’s movements (Midgley 2006; Robert 1996;
Berkovitch 1999).
Initially organized in mission societies to support male missionaries, by 1915 over forty
denominational women’s mission societies with three million active members existed in America
alone, eclipsing the membership of even the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (Hill
1985:3–8). By the mid-19th century, these societies broke away from male-dominated oversight,
“nickeled and dimed their way into building hospitals and schools around the world,” and
mobilized single female missionaries to meet the educational needs of the field (Robert
1996:129). By 1890, single women constituted over sixty percent of the American mission force
(Robert 1996), and by 1899, single women accounted for 46 percent of the Church Missionary
As part of the Protestant missionary movement, they formed the largest movement of
non-state modern actors in the world and catalyzed the spread of mass education wherever they
went (Gallego and Woodberry 2010; Jensz 2012; Lankina and Getachew 2013; Nunn 2014;
Sunquist 2001; Whitehead 1999; Woodberry 2004, 2007, 2012). Primary sources count as many
11
as 29,000 Protestant missionaries in every region of the world (Robert 2002) and in nearly 140
countries in 1925 (Beach and Fahs 1925), and some estimate that women made up nearly two-
thirds of this force (Daggett 1883; Robert 2004). With such size and scope, Protestant
missionaries were the primary source of education for the non-elite, and for girls in general, for
most of the 19th century (Jensz 2012; Sunquist 2001; Whitehead 1999; Woodberry 2007).
identify the mechanisms through which they institutionalized female education. First, I’ll
highlight the historical milieu of the Woman’s Missionary Movement in which female Protestant
missionaries developed their motivation for expanding female education. Second, I’ll identify
some of the mechanisms through which female Protestant missionaries contributed to the
Why did female Protestant missionaries mobilize to expand female education to Asia,
Africa, and Latin America? The surge of female Protestant missionaries at the end of the 19th
century occurred in the context of broader elevations of women’s status and opportunities in the
Western world. By the late 19th century, women in American and England had experienced a
unimaginable at the beginning of the century (Kinnear 1982; Meyer et al. 1979; Murray 2000;
Scott 1978; Sweet 1985). In this section, I will review the 19th century religious, educational,
and ideological milieu of female Protestant missionaries, showing how changing associational
seminaries and women’s mission societies, the growing demand for single women on the mission
12
field, and the 19th century women’s movement—motivated and mobilized female Protestant
women to make female education an institutional reality in the rest of the world.
Educational opportunities expanded dramatically for American and British women during
the 19th century. At the beginning of the century, women were frequently “seen as weaker
intellectually than males; they were denied the right to an equal education with males; and they
were educated haphazardly, with few formal opportunities beyond a district school education for
any but the rich” (Sweet 1985:41). However, by 1850, literacy among American women had
climbed to the level of male literacy (Kinnear 1982; Sweet 1985). Pioneers in women’s
education such as Emma Willard, Catherine Beecher, and Mary Lyon organized female
seminaries and schools for women in the U.S. while institutions like Queen’s College and
Bedford College in London catalyzed teacher training and female education in England (Kinnear
1982; Robert 1996; Scott 1978; Sweet 1985). Many of these women in turn became school
teachers at home and abroad (Murray 2000; Robert 1996). In both the U.S. and in England,
Protestant missionary women were typically more educated than their non-missionary peers
In both the U.S. and England, education for girls and young women was largely advanced
by religious entrepreneurs who sought to reform society, elevate women’s status through
education, and ensure future societal progress through socializing children and future mothers.
This was especially evident in the American female seminary movement of the mid-19th
to women. In 1857, in a message to female seminarians in Oxford, Ohio, a city known for its
13
four high quality female seminaries, R.L. Stanton claimed that “all denominations of the church,
all classes in the community, all parts of our country, seem animated with one common impulse,
to give daughters the same intellectual and moral training, substantially, which has ... been
This drive to educate women was motivated by concerns for the socialization of children
as a means to reforming society. People assumed that, as historian Leonard Sweet has
summarized, “If a child’s mind is a blank page, then women’s fingers are the first to write on it”
(Sweet 1985:43). In the American case, this importance of female education for the socialization
of children was also explicitly tied to nation-building (Meyer et al. 1979). As another
commencement speaker declared to the Brooklyn Female Academy in 1846, “As the standard of
female character among us sinks or rises, I confidently expect that both our political and
religious horizon will become more deeply overcast, or the clouds that now darken them will
pass away” (Sweet 1985:43–44). In the British missionary case, the emphasis was less on nation-
building and more on providing social uplift and “benevolence,” following from the emphasis on
the poor and children common to British evangelicals of the 19th century (Murray 2000;
Prochaska 1980). Whether advocacy for women’s education was driven by concerns for nation-
building, social uplift or belief in the individual worth, intellectual equality and spiritual
responsibility of women, one can find the seeds of the modern actorhood and world polity
characteristics present in these Protestant movements for female education. Not only did these
expanding educational opportunities provide critical resources, skills, and modern ideologies but
they also provided associational opportunities upon which the Woman’s Missionary Movement
would build.
14
America, coincided with changes in attitudes and associational power among women. They
significant mobilizing potential on behalf of self, the other, and universalized norms and
collective ideals (Berkovitch 1999; Midgley 2006; Robert 1996; c.f. Meyer and Jepperson 2000;
Baker 2014). It is well-known how women organized for abolition, suffrage, prohibition, but less
well-known is their organizing for Protestant missions. The Women’s Board of Mission, the first
independent women’s missionary association, was founded in 18685 in New England and
sparked a number of other independent denominational women’s missionary societies such that
by 1900 over forty such societies existed with three million active members in America alone
the building of schools and hospitals and their lobbying of the male-dominated denominational
mission agencies for female education, but their most significant work was establishing and
advancing the legitimacy of sending single female missionaries to the mission field as teachers,
doctors, and ministers (Murray 2000; Robert 1996). The mission field provided professional
opportunities not yet available back home, and they extended their organizing capacities in
5
For reference, “secular” women’s movement associations began around this time as
well. The International Council of Women was founded in 1888 and the General Federation of
Women’s Clubs was founded in 1890. The first International Congress of Women was held in
developing schools, hospitals, and networks of indigenous “Bible women.” By the end of the
19th century, these women had gained such power and capacity for self-directed action that the
denomination nonetheless—could exclaim in 1910: “We see the century opening with women in
the cribbed, cabined, and confined sphere to which the natural prejudices of a man-monopolized
world has assigned them, ... The [women’s] movement ... broke down their isolation, expanded
In mobilizing for mission, the Woman’s Missionary Movement resembled essential other
women’s movements in their reification of womanhood and the plight of women around the
world. They coordinated their efforts on behalf of a socially constructed self, e.g. “the Christian
woman,” a reified other, e.g. “the heathen women,” and according to universalized principles and
norms, e.g. intellectual equality of the sexes (Midgley 2006; Prevost 2009; Robert 2002;
Montgomery 1910; Daggett 1883). Similarly to other 19th century women’s movements
(Berkovitch 1999), they framed their claims on behalf of “woman” (Prevost 2009; Robert 2004).
In fact, this reification was a central point of female missionary rhetoric. Many of the women’s
missionary societies used “woman” in the name, e.g. the Woman’s Board of Mission of the
Congregational Church, the Woman’s Union Missionary Society, and even the movement itself,
the Woman’s Missionary Movement (Montgomery 1910; Prevost 2009; Reeves-Ellington 2011).
Further, “woman” was universalized in solidarity for empowerment, as one woman wrote in a
missionary periodical in 1869: “If all men are brothers, all women are sisters. Yes, the wretched
widow, looking her last upon this beautiful world through the smoke of her suttee pyre… these
women are our sisters … We feel greatly moved to give them the blessings of Christian
The reification of “woman” served to stoke expanding education and social uplift, even
though an emphasis on motherhood and an ideology of “woman’s work for woman” also
constrained the range of opportunities to teaching, medicine, and some independent religious
ministry. The transformative nature of education sparked further evolution of female Protestant
activity; in China, female Protestant missionaries were influential among Chinese men as well as
women, and a number of Chinese women converts went on to become leading educators, doctors
and evangelists (Bays 2012; Shemo 2011; Murray 2000; Robert 1996; Vaughan 1920). As one
historian noted, “The seriousness of woman's mission required that her education be taken
seriously. And as her education was taken seriously, so too was she” (Sweet 1985:55).
Chapter 4
resulted in the spread of female Protestant missionaries throughout the globe in attempts to
educate, evangelize, and elevate women and girls. Though these women were primed to extend
female education to the rest of the world, what were the mechanisms of its expansion and
political elites and economic development, on the one hand, and post-WWII self-generating
expansion, on the other hand, these theories presuppose the legitimacy of female education and
the essential infrastructure upon which mass education is built. While I am not able to test the
I propose historical evidence of a number of mechanisms which are generally associated with
though they may not always hold at that level, when considered in aggregate at the higher level,
make the higher-level theory more accurate, precise, and believable. In sum, female Protestant
missionaries diffused the legitimacy of female education through embodying its outcomes and
integrating it within patterns of reproduction, and they established critical infrastructure for its
Diffusion, or the spread cultural objects or practices, is contingent on both social and
associative contagion (Goldberg and Stein 2018) and upon reinforcement (Colyvas and Jonsson
2011). Female Protestant missionaries established both relational and associative connections
between education for girls and other desirable practices and ideals. These connections were
reinforced through the development of new vocational opportunities and missionary activism.
First, they connected education for women to resisting indigenous cultural practices
which they and others perceived as harmful, e.g. sati (widow-burning), foot binding, and forced
marriage (Midgley 2006; Prevost 2009; Reeves-Ellington 2011; Robert 1996). Along with efforts
to provide medical resources to women and girls, female Protestant missionaries sought to
establish associations between education and general health and well-being (Kahlenberg 2016;
Xu 2016).
education and new roles made available to women during this period. Beyond agriculture or
small trades, they developed opportunities to teach, practice medicine, work in religious
vocations, etc. (Midgley 2006; Robert 1996; Woodberry 2007). The extensive presence of
unmarried female missionaries furthered this positive association of legitimate options outside of
traditional roles. For instance, in one report concerning the post-matriculation status of a class of
young women at a school in Beirut, the missionary noted that only 20% of the students went on
to start a family. The other 70% were working as teachers, nurses, or in some similar field or had
Third, they developed new network connections for young women to further their
education and professional development in these new roles. Through transnational networks,
19
female students in missionary schools could gain knowledge of and access to educational
opportunities abroad. Turning to an example from China, Chinese Christian women Kang Cheng
and Shi Meiyu were brought to the University of Michigan for medical school by American
missionary Gertrude Howe, after which they returned to China to establish hospitals in Jiujiang
their aggressive expansion of schools and recruitment of girls. Their efforts were not without
scrutiny, however. In India, missionaries paid girls to attend school (Allender 2006:199), and in
China, missionaries would adopt orphaned girls in order to secure their attendance in missionary
schooling. Further, locals would often resist and seek to restrict the religious elements of
missionary schooling (Fleischmann 2002; Woodberry 2007). Though the aggressive recruitment
sparked indigenous backlash and long-term distrust, it did reinforce the diffusion of female
education such that more girls and their families were connected to missionary schools.
contingent on legitimacy and reproduction (Colyvas and Jonsson 2011). As with diffusion, there
must be a connection of new cultural forms and practices to higher order cultural frames which
are either indigenous or resonate with indigenous ideals and practices (Johnson, Dowd, and
Ridgeway 2006; Snow and Benford 1988). The 19th century was one of increasing global
tension and interconnection between Europeans and the rest of the world, and education was
central to this process (Go 2008). In this context, missionary education resonated with both
20
progress and resistance to colonial powers (De Haas and Frankema 2018; Fields 1982; Gaitskell
Any resonance with these frames was quite complicated. Female missionaries extended a
vision of female empowerment, and this was mediated through what some have termed
“providential imperialism” and “missionary feminism” (Prevost 2009; c.f. Midgley 2006). Many
have noted the problematic nature of these efforts as the Woman’s Missionary Movement
benefited heavily from their construction of indigenous women as oppressed, helpless, and in
need of rescue (Fitzgerald 2003:200; Goodman 2000; Jensz 2012; Midgley 2006; Prevost 2009;
Robert 1996). Drawing on the missionary ideology of “woman’s work for woman,” these
missionaries promoted Victorian domestic norms of motherhood and child-rearing along with
their educational and religious aims (Francis-Dehqani 2000; Murray 2000; Robert 1996). Post-
colonial scholars have noted how this import of Victorian gender roles contributed to
reproducing gender inequality (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:199; Midgley 2006; Prevost 2009;
c.f. De Haas and Frankema 2018). However, the legacy of these “civilizing” attempts is as
complicated as the efforts. The somewhat paradoxical and conflicted influence of these
“Early promoters of female missionary activity were certainly not advocates of liberal
feminist individualism: they did not openly challenge patriarchal male authority or the ideology
of separate spheres, and they did not call for female social equality or women’s rights. However,
carving out a psychological space for female agency and articulating a distinctive female
imperial mission at the heart of the evangelical project challenged hegemonic understandings of
the appropriate nature and role of middle-class women: the belief that such women were weak
and should be protected, that they should remain in the family home and a circumscribed local
21
social circle until marriage, and that their destiny was marriage and motherhood rather than an
active role in the wider world beyond the bounds of home and of nation. Promoters of women’s
foreign missionary work emphasized the inter-linking of public and private spheres, the
possibility of combining self-sacrifice with self-fulfillment, and the overlapping of both the
qualities of character and the roles of male and female missionaries” (Midgley 2006:357).
maintaining religious faithfulness and pushing the boundaries of female agency with the rhetoric
responsibility to “go into all the world and preach the Gospel to all creation.”6 Though their
religious aims were less successful in Asia and the Middle East, their embodiment of a new
educated agency and their linking of education to a mission of social uplift for women resonated
with many. Education was connected to the prestige and power of the West and given that both
colonial and indigenous governments initially resisted educating girls, missionary education was
a way to get around these barriers to accessing perceived mechanisms of Western progress. As
one missionary remarked concerning many of the women educated in the missionary schools of
Beirut and Tripoli, “the active position of women in missionary life stood in sharp contrast to the
position of their sisters in the Moslem [sic] Middle East … The mere presence of these unveiled
workers … who… entered into the professional and social life of men [and] also into community
endeavor, could only serve to erode old notions about the place of women in society” (as quoted
6
Mark 16:15
22
gardens, utility buildings, water-supply systems, and good access roads […] stand in great
contrast with their immediate surroundings. In the confrontation of Europeans with African ways
of life these stations have been for the missionaries a refuge, a symbol of achievement and a
home; for the Africans they have been strongholds of alien ways from religion to agriculture, an
intrusion but also a promise of help, of learning and of a better life’” (Johnson 1967:168 italics
mine).
While female missionary efforts at education and social uplift were seen as an
“intrusion,” they also served as newly available strategies of action (Swidler 1986). In the
Christianity” as “powerful means of both reclaiming lost forms of authority and forging new
health, and spirituality that resonated with older religious ideologies and social organization”
(Prevost 2009:779). More broadly, indigenous women took advantage of the educational
opportunities and newly available roles to engage in social action in contesting hierarchies and
racial politics (c.f. note 62 in Prevost 2009:780) and to advance professionally as teachers,
doctors, and administrators (Bays 2012; Fleischmann 2002; Francis-Dehqani 2000; Gaitskell
2007; Montgomery 1910; Murray 2000; Okonkwo and Ezeh 2013; Robert 1996; Shemo 2011;
Suzuki 2013; Xu 2016; but see De Haas and Frankema 2018; Montgomery 2017). As cultural
historians of colonial missions are now noting, the higher order cultural frame of female
“progress” and empowerment was not constrained by Western conceptions but was rather
The discussion above overlaps, therefore, with my prior discussion on the dynamics of
diffusion of female education. One of the conditions under which things diffuse by association
rather than by social connections is uncertainty about the utility of adopting certain practices
(Goldberg and Stein 2018). When female missionaries first began establishing schools for girls
in the early 19th century, there was little functional demand for it. In most cases, schooling was
for the elite and girls were often married off early. The advent of schools for girls with the arrival
of female Protestant missionaries at the turn of the 19th century was a case wherein the value of
providing education for girls outstripped the “technical requirements at hand” (Selznick 1957:17;
as quoted in Colyvas and Jonsson 2011). There was no female labor force which required
Western education, no nation to build through educated mothers and female teachers, no taken-
for-granted educational norms for indigenous or colonial governments. The task of legitimizing
female education had few points of support in functional terms, but it gained legitimacy through
symbolic value as female education was associated with social uplift, progress, and the
perception of empowerment that the female missionaries embodied. This legitimacy of education
for girls was combined with mechanisms of social reproduction, as we will see in the following
section.
Legitimation is not enough for female education to “stick;” integration into structures of
education itself. They started teacher training schools and colleges for women, thereby
24
educators. In China, for instance, female missionaries established the North China Women’s
College, Ginling Women’s College, McTyeire Home and School for Girls, and the Hwa Nan
college for women, and these schools grew in enrollments – from 17,000 in 1889 to almost
250,000 by 1925 – and in status, setting the standard in modern education from childhood
through post-secondary education (Bays 2012). Along with training indigenous teachers, female
Protestant missionaries also trained “Bible women” to teach the Bible, extend humanitarian
efforts, and support the mission. Education for these Bible women grew in complexity and
duration over time, developing into female seminaries and then into colleges (Tucker 1985).
Drawing on their own experience of educational expansion, female Protestant missionaries also
put into place educational techniques such as child-focused texts and age and ability-graded
into socialization structures and systems. They lobbied parents, mission societies, local
indigenous leaders, and colonial governments in their efforts to expand schools for girls. It was
not uncommon for missionary teachers to travel from village to village to lobby with parents and
recruit girls to missionary schools (Bays 2012; Hunter 1984; Vaughan 1920). In some cases,
parents sought out education for their girls, in other cases, girls joined missionary schools in
spite of parental opposition (Fleischmann 2002; Jensz 2012; Vaughan 1920). They also lobbied
heavily with male-dominated mission societies to send single female missionaries to meet the
growing demand for teachers, and they advocated for girls’ schools in when support for
education as a mission strategy began to wane (Robert 1996). Finally, these missionaries
produced literature, lobbied the British parliament, and appealed to local leaders for support of
25
female education and against common hindrances to girls’ participation such as forced marriage
and foot binding (Bays 2012; Jensz 2012; Prevost 2009; Reeves-Ellington 2011:201; Robert
1996).
education initiatives from Catholic missionaries and others (Gallego and Woodberry 2010;
Lankina and Getachew 2013; Nunn 2014; Woodberry 2004, 2007, 2012). Also, many of the
schools or were exposed to gender parity in education as a result of competition with missionary
schools (Robert 2002, 2009:68; Whitehead 1999; Woodberry 2007). Finally, international
societies, eventually coalesced into such bodies as the World Council of Churches, which
lobbied with the newly formed United Nations as early as 1946 (Robert 2002, 2004).
In summary, the female missionary-led expansion of female education beyond the West
was marked by reinforced diffusion, increased legitimacy, and the development of mechanisms
resistance to missionary education, particularly to the missionaries’ religious aims and Victorian
domestic ideals. However, these missionary women embodied a new educated agency and
passed on this agency to girls and other women, furthering the diffusion and institutionalization
of female education. As missionary education for girls was widespread well before the
establishment of national education systems, the world polity, and other factors commonly
associated with its expansion in the post-WWII era, I propose the following hypothesis:
26
Hypothesis: Female Protestant missionary work in the colonial era will be strongly
associated with levels of female education in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the post-WWII
In this section I present the measures and analytic method for testing the association
between the Woman’s Missionary Movement and long-run trends in female education in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America. Specifically, I test the association between female Protestant
missionaries and adjusted female gross enrollment ratios in the post-WWII period (1950-2010).
For this period, I use the mean value of each time-variant variable for as many years as it is
available; this applies to the gross enrollment ratios and to several of the control variables, e.g.
GDP, IGO ties, fertility rate, etc. I estimate the relationship using OLS regression in nested
models to compare the effect of female missionary work to alternative predictors upon adding
them to the model. I will describe the measures below, and I will describe the analytic method in
Dependent Variable
To measure the overall level of female education, I use the adjusted gross enrollment
ratios at the primary and secondary level from Lee and Lee (2016). These estimates of gross
enrollment were constructed five-year intervals for 111 countries from 1820-2010, and they are
adjusted to account for both students repeating grades and for over and under-aged students. As
28
such, the maximum enrollment rate is set at 100%.7 It provides adjusted gross enrollment ratios
by gender for each country in the same five-year intervals. I calculate the mean female gross
enrollment ratio at the primary and secondary levels for each country for the time period 1950-
2010. While missionaries were some of the first to establish universities in Asia and Africa
(Sunquist 2001; Woodberry 2007), and many of these included women, there was not yet
available a large supply of women educated at the primary and secondary levels to establish
long-run effects at the tertiary level. Therefore, I limit my analysis to primary and secondary
school enrollments.
In order to measure the effect of the Woman’s Missionary Movement, I use the number
of female Protestant missionaries per 10,000 capita, by country in 1923. This measure was
developed by Robert Woodberry (Woodberry 2004, 2012) from the statistical tables in the World
Missionary Atlas (Beach and Fahs 1925).8 This atlas is the latest and most complete atlas of
7
If using a strict gross enrollment ratio, developed countries often have over 100% due to
students repeating grades. If using a net enrollment ratio, similar problems exist due to students
in primary or secondary school who are either older or younger than the standard age range.
8
The counts of missionaries are based on country borders in 1994 (Woodberry 2004).
The gender disaggregated data comes from Woodberry (2004), but the overall counts of
missionaries per country from Woodberry (2012) have been further adjusted and corrected. In
order to harmonize the 2004 gender disaggregated data other mission variables with the 2012
29
Protestant missionary activity during this period. Significant statistical accounting of Protestant
missionary work began in preparation for the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in
1910, one of the largest and most ecumenical gatherings of Protestants at the time. The data from
1923, though only a cross-sectional picture of female Protestant missionary work, represents the
high point of missionary presence before the breakup of colonial empires and the nationalization
of missionary and colonial schools during decolonization. In lieu of not having comprehensive
data from the start of Protestant missions to the end of the colonial period, this year provides an
ideal but conservative estimate of the cumulative impact of Protestant missionaries (Woodberry
2004, 2012).
While I hypothesize that the relationship between female Protestant missionaries and
female education is due to the overall effect of female missionary work, i.e. their educational,
medical, religious, and activist work, I also measure the extent of their educational work by
including a measure of the number of schools per 10,000 capita at the primary and secondary
levels by country in 1923. This data comes from Woodberry’s (2004) coding of The World
Missionary Atlas. To account for the length of exposure to Protestant missionaries, I also include
a variable for the number of years from the first established mission to 1950, also from
Woodberry (2012). Descriptive statistics for these and all other variables are included in Table 1.
corrections, I created a weight variable to adjust the 2004 counts to match the 2012 total
missionary distribution by country. Results are similar using the unadjusted counts, though the
Control Variables
education, I include several different measures. I use the percentage of the population that is
urban (United Nations 2018), the country’s GDP per capita in current US$, logged to adjust for
skew, and the female labor force participation rate (World Bank 2019a, 2019b).9 I also include
measures of ethnic and religious fractionalization (Alesina et al. 2003) to control for conflict
To test Protestant missionary influence against world polity integration, I include the
during the period of observation, taken from version 2.3 of the COW Intergovernmental
Organizations dataset (Pevehouse, Nordstrom, and Warnke 2004). I use the mean number of
months from the passage of CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of
Discrimination Against Women) in December 1979, to the date of ratification for each country.
CEDAW ratification has been used in other studies (Cole and Geist 2018; Paxton et al. 2006) as
adaptation of the measure better captures the degree of alignment with world society norms than
a simple dichotomous measure, as nearly every country has ratified the convention by now. I
also include the Polity IV (Marshall, Jaggers, and Gurr 2018) measure of democracy to account
9
Taiwan data for GDP and female labor force participation is from Taiwan’s National
To further identify world polity and institutional influences, I include dummy measures
for whether a country gained independence prior to the end of World War II (Correlates of War
Project 2016). This measure captures the potential for exposure to world polity norms
concerning female education. World polity and institutional theorists argue that world polity
scripts and discourse about women active during the state formation process will influence the
institutional character of the nation once it achieves sovereignty (Bradley and Ramirez 1996;
Paxton et al. 2006). In contrast to other approaches that emphasize women’s political
empowerment (Paxton et al. 2006), I only distinguish between pre- and post-WWII in order to
measure of when the system of primary education and secondary education was established, i.e.
prior to the expansion of female missionaries (pre-1870), during the height of female missionary
educational activity (1870-1945), or after WWII (post-1945) using estimated dates of the first
Western style schools at each level, taken from Appendix A in Lee and Lee (2016). State-driven
explanations point to compulsory education laws in expanding mass education, so I also include
a measure of the existence of and first establishment of compulsory education in the constitution,
i.e. before or after WWII, taken from the Characteristics of National Constitutions data set
the elite in literate societies like China, whereas they focused on the non-elite elsewhere. As
such, countries that had writing systems prior to missionary education would have experienced
less mass education and would have been more resistant to missionary educational influence.
32
Therefore, I include a measure identifying whether a country had a written language prior to
missionary arrival, taken from various sources (Haywood 2011; Woodberry 2004, 2012).
related to gender norms has found that a legacy of plow use in agricultural cultivation is related
to very stable non-egalitarian gender norms, particularly lower female labor force participation
and less support for women in the workforce. Plows typically required significant upper body
strength and therefore constrained agricultural work to the men thus establishing separate spheres
of labor between men and women which persist both institutionally and at a cultural and
cognitive level (Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn 2013). I also control for percent plow use by
country to account for persistent non-egalitarian cultural patterns on female education. This is an
important measure for testing the degree to which a society was open to alternative roles and
socialization processes for girls. In societies with less gender separation between the public and
private spheres, we would expect more widespread openness to a new developmental trajectory.
However, it is also possible that the availability of new legitimized roles would prove more
appealing to women and girls who were without options for engaging the public sphere.
I also include a control for whether or not a country has a Confucian heritage,10 and I use
measures for whether a country is majority Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, or Protestant, developed
10
While other studies have limited the designation of Confucian heritage to China and
including Taiwan, Macau, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Japan, and South Korea. This is a more
according to the average majority religious population for the period 1950-2010, from the World
Christian Database (Johnson and Zurlo 2018). Following (Cole and Geist 2018), I employ this
strategy to identify dominant cultural factors associated with institutionalized gender norms
regarding female education (Bradley and Ramirez 1996; Cole and Geist 2018; Dorius and
Firebaugh 2010).
former British colonies, taken from Woodberry (2012), as British colonies maintained an open
market for educational expansion, in contrast to Catholic, Dutch, and other colonial powers who
maintained greater control over the educational system and limited the work of missionaries. I
also include a measure of European descent taken from Alesina et al (2013) in order to control
for cultural influence via demographic influence. I also include a dummy for Communist
countries, as Communist countries were more likely to advance egalitarian policies for women in
Geographic controls: I include the latitude and the mean distance (km) to the coast or
navigable waterway of each country as a control for endogeneity of where missionaries were
likely to go and for relative exposure to Westernizing influences during the colonial era
(Woodberry 2012). This data comes from Gallup et al (Gallup, Sachs, and Mellinger 1999). I
present descriptive statistics in Table 1 below and correlation coefficients for these and all
cultural traditions as Confucian heritage influences the adoption of other later institutions such as
Results
In Table 2, I first provide the total number of female Protestant missionaries and the rate
per 10,000 capita, both taken from Woodberry (2004, 2012), and the total count divided by the
number of school-aged (15-24) females in 1925 in thousands, taken from (2016). In this sample
of countries for which there is education data, the total number of female Protestant missionaries
in 1925 ranges from 4,383 in China and 3,154 in India to just one or two missionaries in
countries like Oman, Dominica, Mongolia, Mali, and Russia and zero in countries such as
Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, and Cape Verde. The number of female missionaries per 1,000
school-aged females (15-24) ranges from 1.056 in Barbados to 0.002 in Mali and Senegal. The
number of female missionaries per 10,000 capita ranges from 2.89 in Fiji and 1.80 in Swaziland
to 0.0079 in Senegal and 0.0002 in Russia. In the full sample with 1925 population data, the total
number of female missionaries in 1925 is 16,850 distributed among 136 countries. The full table
is shown in Appendix B. Female Protestant missionaries were a sizeable force and were spread
quite broadly across continents, countries, and empires by the early 20th century.
36
Next, I show two scatter plots of the female enrollment ratio at primary and secondary
levels by the number of female missionaries per country for the 76 countries in the following
regression analysis. The distribution of female missionaries in 1923 shows that most of the
countries have less than one female missionary per 10,000 capita. For those that with higher
African countries (Swaziland, South Africa, Zimbabwe) make up the majority, Oceania (Fiji),
the Latin America (Belize), the Caribbean (Barbados), and the Middle East (Kuwait) are
represented here. However, all of these countries are former British colonies, illustrating the
Mean primary enrollments after WWII are mostly above 50%, with 13 Sub-Saharan
African countries making up the majority of the 21 countries below 50%. Of these 13 African
countries, only four are former British colonies, further illustrating the importance of British
colonization for educational outcomes. In contrast, only 12 countries have greater than 50%
female enrollment for the time period. While there is not a visible regional pattern for these 12
countries, six of them are former British colonies and four were not significantly colonized by
European powers. British colonization seems to be more associated with female enrollments at
the primary level, and the expansion of secondary enrollments follows more closely the world
Both bivariate relationships demonstrate a positive slope as evidenced by the fitted line.
There are no strong outliers in the primary enrollment chart; the distribution generally follows
the fitted line. However, Russia and Japan are well off the line in the secondary enrollment chart,
having had very few female missionaries but a high level of female enrollments at the secondary
level. These findings are consistent with others in which Japan is often classified with
38
female education and political representation earlier than others (Paxton and Kunovich 2003).
1923
39
In the following analysis, I estimate nested OLS regressions on the mean female
enrollment at the primary and secondary levels for the period 1950-2010. While Breusch-
Pagan/Cook-Weisberg tests for heteroskedasticity do not show heteroskedasticity for some of the
nested models in both analyses, the test does show heteroskedasticity in the full models.
Therefore, I report robust standard errors in each model, for the sake of consistency. The robust
standard errors are generally lower in these models than the normal standard errors.
Primary Enrollments
In the first analysis, I estimate the effect of traditional measures on female enrollment at
the primary level. In Model 1 of Table 3, traditional predictors of the expansion of female
education perform as expected. Economic development as measured by the natural log of GDP
40
per capita is a strong predictor of higher female primary education levels and is statistically
significant at the p<0.001 level. However, integration into the world polity measured by the
mean number of IGO ties is negatively associated with female education at the primary level
(b=-0.47, p<0.01), and the estimate for delay in CEDAW ratification is negatively, as expected,
but only marginally significant (p<0.1). The communist indicator is negatively related, but also
When the missionary variables are included in Model 1a, as hypothesized, the number of
female missionaries per 10,000 capita is a strong predictor of female primary enrollments in the
post-WWII era. Holding all else constant, a unit increase in female Protestant missionaries is
associated with a 7.634 percentage point higher mean female primary enrollment rate and is
statistically significant at the p<0.01 level. The number of years of missionary activity prior to
1950 is also positively associated with female primary education (b=0.061, p<0.05). Consistent
with theory concerning the positive effect of state-mandated compulsory education (Boli et al.
1985), countries with no compulsory education have a lower female primary enrollment by
11.204 percentage points (p<0.05), compared to those with compulsory education, holding all
else constant.
In Model 2, I estimate the effect of cultural, religious, and colonial factors on female
primary enrollments. Interestingly, the plow measure has a positive point estimate (b=10.710,
p<0.05), suggesting that countries with greater levels of historical plow use, e.g. stronger
tendencies toward gender-segregated roles in the public sphere, have higher female participation
in education at the primary level. Though this finding is counterintuitive, it could be explained
by the higher opportunity cost of engaging in female education when well-established routes for
female participation in the agricultural labor market exist. The percentage of European ancestry
41
and indicators for Catholic and Protestant majority countries are only marginally significant, but
they are all positively associated with female primary education, as predicted by theories of the
Table 3: OLS Regression Predicting Female Primary Education, 1950-2010, with Robust Standard Errors
Including the missionary variables in Model 2, we see that every additional female
Protestant missionary per 10,000 capita in 1923 predicts a 13.292 percentage point increase in
the female primary enrollment level, holding all else constant, significant at the p<0.001 level.
The number of years of missionary work is also positively associated (b=0.066, p<0.05).
Considering the other variables, only the plow measure retains any statistical significance, and its
point estimate increases (b=11.431, p<0.05), suggesting that the work of missionaries increased
the potential of traditional gender norms to catalyze educational opportunities for girls.
In the full model, I present the missionary variables with all the variables of models one
and two together, and I include the fully standardized coefficients to compare the effects to each
other. The natural log of GDP per capita has the largest positive coefficient at 0.401 (p<0.001),
followed by plow use at 0.244 (p<0.01) and the number of female missionaries with 0.209
(p<0.01). The coefficient for female Protestant missionaries decreases to 6.912 (p<0.05) and the
number of years of missionary exposure increases to its highest estimate, 0.074. The natural log
of GDP per capita increases slightly from Model 1a to 8.551, and the plow measure increases
slightly to 11.716. The strong positive effect of missionary work and national development is
consistent with other findings concerning the long-run contribution of Protestant missionaries to
both liberal democracy (Woodberry 2012) and economic development through human capital
development (Alpino and Hammersmark 2017; Fourie and Swanepoel 2015; McCleary 2013).
Historical plow use continues to be an important historical factor in the development of female
education, and while ethnic fractionalization is only marginally significant, and its negative point
estimate suggests that the potential for ethnic group competition does not increase female
education. In fact, this negative effect was most likely exacerbated by colonial and missionary
favoring some groups over others, particularly in Africa (De Haas and Frankema 2018).
45
Though these findings confirm the hypothesis at the primary level, I further test
missionary effect using other important controls and measures of alternative explanations. In
Model 4 of Table 4, I include a control for the fertility rate, which is strongly associated with
mass education and modernization (Baker 2014; Inglehart and Norris 2003). Due to a high
correlation with the fertility rate (-0.69), I exclude the natural log of GDP per capita in Model 4.
In Model 4 and following, I exclude latitude and percent European as controls due to excessive
collinearity.11 I also control for female labor force participation (Model 5), the period of primary
school establishment (Model 6), and the percent urban population (Model 7).
11
This collinearity was present in the full model in Table 3 as well but removing these
controls in that model did not influence the point estimates or standard errors.
46
Table 4: OLS Regression Predicting Female Primary Education, 1950-2010, with Robust Standard Errors
Yrs Miss Exposure 0.022 (0.024) 0.076*** (0.021) 0.061** (0.022) 0.068** (0.023)
Fertility Rate -10.088*** (1.921)
Pct Female Labor Force 0.075 (0.143)
Primary Est Pre-1870 3.001 (2.973)
Primary Est Post-1945 17.261* (6.447)
Pct Urban Pop 0.357** (0.114)
Fem Pri 1870-1945 0.307** (0.114) 0.369** (0.124) 0.558*** (0.123) 0.463*** (0.119)
47
In each model, the effects of the missionary variables are strong and statistically
significant (though the years of missionary exposure is not in Model 4). As female missionaries
resisted forced and early marriages for individualistic and educational reasons, it is not surprising
that the female missionary effect is large in Model 4. Female labor force participation is not a
statistically significant predictor of female education at the primary level and given Protestant
missionary emphasis on motherhood and gender-separated spheres of work and the early
emphasis on socializing future mothers through primary education, these results are not
surprising either. In Model 6, countries with primary schooling established after WWII have
higher female primary enrollments than those earlier, in support of world polity and institutional
theories. However, this does not remove the long-run effect of female missionaries or the years
of missionary exposure, as many of these systems of mass education emerged out of missionary
schools (Sunquist 2001; Woodberry 2007, 2012). Finally, the percent of the population that is
urban, a significant measure of modernization, does not remove the long-run effect of missionary
work on female education. Taken together, these findings suggest that the work of female
Protestant missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th century is one of the primary sources of
the levels of female primary education in Asia, Africa, and Latin America post-WWII.
Secondary Enrollments
I next repeated my analysis at the secondary level with the number of missionary
secondary schools included in the models, and I present results in Table 5. The effect of
missionary work in the colonial era is not as strong a predictor at the secondary level, yet there is
a consistent association. When controlling only for world polity and nation-state variables, the
effect of the years of missionary exposure is slightly lower than at the primary level (b=0.032,
49
p<0.05). When controlling only for cultural, religious, and colonial factors, the missionary
variables do not achieve statistical significance. However, in the full model, the number of
missionary secondary schools predicts higher female enrollments at the secondary level such that
for every additional missionary secondary school per 10,000 capita in 1923, there is an
associated 66.717 percentage increase female secondary enrollment (p<0.05), holding all else
constant. These models point to the long-run institution-building effect of Protestant missionaries
At the secondary level, the effect of the plow and the natural log of GDP per capita
perform similarly as they did at the primary level. The opportunity cost of sending girls to school
at the secondary level is even greater than at the primary level in societies with agricultural labor
opportunities for women. Though the finding is counterintuitive, it seems that the lack of labor
market egalitarianism left space open for female secondary education, and associated new labor
opportunities, to fill. Protestant majority countries are more likely to have higher levels of female
education, as others have noted (Woodberry 2012), and I find no support in these models for
Table 5: OLS Regression Predicting Female Secondary Education, 1950-2010, with Robust Standard Errors
For means of comparison, I also include the standardized coefficients for the full model.
The largest coefficient is for the natural log of GDP per capita (0.552), followed by historical
plow use (0.252), pre-WWII female primary enrollments (0.226), Protestant majority countries
(0.207), and the number of missionary secondary schools (0.13). While traditional associations
of female secondary education with development are strongest, these findings still point to
secondary education.
I employ the same additional tests from the primary level at the secondary level in Table
6. As before, I test the missionary effect against the fertility rate, female labor force participation,
the period in which the secondary school system was established, and the percent of the
population that is urban. I also exclude the natural log of GDP per capita in Model 4 and latitude
and percent European in all models due to collinearity.12 Similar to my analysis at the primary
level, the fertility rate is strongly negatively associated with female secondary education (b=-
10.921, p<0.001), but it does not remove the effect of the number of colonial missionary
secondary schools (b=55.250, p<0.05). This model also provides support for world polity
integration as those countries which achieved independence prior to WWII show lower levels of
female secondary education (b=-8.360, p<0.05) than those that achieved independence in the
present in Model 5 (b=66.057 p<0.05) when controlling for female labor force participation, and
12
As at the primary level, I also estimated the full mode excluding latitude and percent
the years of exposure to Protestant missionaries is also statistically significant at the p<0.05
level. Female labor force participation is not a significant predictor of female secondary
significant when controlling for the period of secondary school establishment, and those
countries in which first established secondary schooling after WWII have lower levels of female
secondary education than countries with earlier establishment dates. While integration into the
world polity via nation-state formation furthers female education, these findings suggest that
later beginnings hamper institutional development. Finally, the effect of the missionary variables
is not statistically significant when controlling for percent urban, lending strong support to
modernization theories.
54
Table 6: OLS Regression Predicting Female Secondary Education, 1950-2010, with Robust Standard Errors
Distance to Coast/River 0.005* (0.002) 0.004* (0.002) 0.005* (0.002) 0.004* (0.002)
Fem Sec 1870-1945 4.109*** (1.098) 3.008** (1.066) 3.422*** (0.941) 3.645** (1.079)
Constant 87.863*** (11.586) -38.880* (15.138) -28.219 (17.218) 18.427+ (9.963)
Countries 76 76 64 76
F 30.209 33.724 63.896 30.840
R-Square 0.854 0.864 0.890 0.873
Adj. R-Square 0.789 0.800 0.817 0.816
Note: Latitude and Percent European removed in all models due to excessive collinearity.
^ Ln GDP per capita not included due to collinearity with fertility rate and percent urban population.
+ p<0.1 * p<0.05 ** p<0.01 *** p<0.001
Robust Standard errors in parenthesis.
56
In summary, I found that the work of colonial female Protestant missionaries to establish
and expand primary and secondary education for girls was a consistently statistically significant
predictor of female primary enrollment ratios in 76 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America
from 1950-2010. At the secondary level, there is some support for colonial missionary efforts net
of other factors, but world polity and modernization explanations are dominant. As noted above,
the activity of colonial Protestant missionaries in general is linked in various countries and
regions of the world with education, democracy, and economic development. However, as
Protestantism is linked to long run trends in development and modernization (Acemoglu et al.
2005; Woodberry 2012; Weber 1905), these findings lend support to the effect of female
Protestant missionaries for two reasons. First, though the missionary variables lend less support
at the secondary level, Protestant majority countries are generally strongly and positively
associated with higher levels of female education (Models 5-7 in Table 6). Protestantism didn’t
begin to expand in Asia, Africa, and Latin America until after the colonial era when indigenous
ministers and Christians took over (Noll 2009; Sunquist 2015). Second, this expansion followed
similar patterns as it had in the 19th century United States, particularly in terms of its
development. This analysis cannot fully test directionality of the effect of GDP per capita on
education as they are measured concurrently, however, since the missionary measures are 25
years prior to these other measures, they offer more evidence of directionality. I interpret this to
mean that GDP per capita is better considered as an intervening variable rather than an
alternative explanation, as the early activity of missionaries created the conditions for later
57
human capital development (Acemoglu et al. 2005; Fourie and Swanepoel 2015; Gallego and
Thus, it seems that, though world polity, modernization, and some state-centered
explanations do account for female educational expansion outside the West, they fall short of
fully explaining secondary expansion and do not very well explain primary expansion. Taking
into account the role of the Woman’s Missionary Movement fills this gap.
Robustness Checks
One question that arises concerning the female missionary effect is whether it is a
spurious effect due to the effect of Protestant missionaries overall or due to the work of male
rather than female missionaries. After all, the heads of most mission societies, mission stations,
and denominational boards were male. It could be that the effect of female missionaries is really
just a proxy for these other sources. There are two approaches to this challenge, one of which is
addressed in the historical section above, that is, that the Woman’s Missionary Movement was
largely responsible for mobilizing the Protestant missions movement to send the increasing
numbers of single women out as teachers and to support the establishment of schools for girls.
The second approach is to differentiate statistically between the female missionary coefficients
and the male or total missionary coefficients. It is tenuous to test this in the current models, as
the number of female missionaries is highly correlated with the number of male missionaries
Another possible strategy is to create a dummy indicator for whether female missionaries
were recorded in 1923. This is a very rough approximation, as whether there were female
missionaries recorded in 1923 does not confirm that there were never female missionaries
58
establishing schools or lobbying for schools prior to 1923,13 and I do not have data for when the
first female missionaries arrived in a country and established schools for girls. Further, only three
out of the 80 countries which have education data have no female missionaries recorded in 1923,
and these also have no missionaries recorded at all: Afghanistan, Cote d’Ivoire, and Niger. Given
these constraints, it is not possible to construct a control case for the presence of female
missionaries. Still, even without the ability to test the presence of female missionaries against
missionary activity without them, the combination of the historical role of the Woman’s
Missionary Movement and the statistical models presented above provides strong support for the
hypothesis.
Another possibility is that one country or region is driving the statistical association
between female missionaries and female education. In order to test this, I estimated the full
model 76 times,14 removing a different country each time, and noted the female missionary
coefficient and years of missionary exposure, in the primary model, and the missionary
secondary schools coefficient in the secondary model, and their p-values. If one country or group
of countries is driving the association, then there will be either only one country or a patterned
group of countries whose removal diminishes the statistical significance. The removal of 11
different countries in the primary model and 15 different countries in the secondary model
removed the statistical significance of the missionary variable, but within these groups were
13
In fact, the wives of missionaries were never counted as missionaries but rather as
“wives,” and single women only began to be counted as missionaries in the late 19th century.
14
I estimated the full models from Tables 3 and 5 without latitude and percent European
countries from every region with little discernible pattern. Given that the statistical significance
of the missionary variables in the full primary and secondary models is p<0.05 with 52 and 51
degrees of freedom, respectively, these findings point to the limited power of these models.
Furthermore, there was no effect on the statistical significance of the years of missionary
exposure variable in the primary enrollment model when removing countries, further illustrating
When dropping countries by region, each region’s removal at the primary level
diminished the statistical significance of the missionary variable, and the removal of Asia,
MENA, and Sub-Saharan Africa diminishes the statistical significance of the missionary school
variable at the secondary level. Only the removal of Asia diminished the statistical significance
of the years of missionary exposure variable. The association of female missionaries with
primary education is dependent upon a full sample, while the association of missionary
secondary schools is secondary education is dependent upon the inclusion of Asia, MENA, and
Sub-Saharan Africa but not Latin America/Carribean. Removing entire regions significantly
affects the degrees of freedom, and given the prevalence of missionary work in Asia, MENA,
Next, I estimated the full models with region dummies, to control for regional effects,
treating Sub-Saharan Africa as the reference group. At the primary level, the coefficient for
female missionaries decreases to 4.48 and loses statistical significance, but the years of
missionary exposure coefficient increases slightly to 0.08 (p<0.01). At the secondary level, the
coefficient for missionary secondary schools decreases to 54.45 (p<0.05), and the years of
missionary exposure loses statistical significance (p<0.1). When controlling for region, rather
than estimating models for each region as above, the missionary variables perform very similarly
60
as in the full models above. Due to the small sample sizes in the regional models, it is likely that
the low statistical power is partly to blame for some of the different outcomes.15 The models in
which I control for region do continue to confirm the average effect of female protestant
In sum, through the primary analysis and these robustness checks, I find a relatively
consistent evidence, ceteris paribus, for the long-run female Protestant missionaries on
between 1950-2010.
15
Similar analysis using pooled OLS with standard errors clustered by panel produces
very similar estimates and lower standard errors. Other analysis which more fully takes into
account within country heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation and which includes fixed effects
for years to address unobserved across panel shocks also produces similar point estimates with
lower standard errors. These cross-sectional OLS results are therefore conservative estimates of
Discussion
Considering how mass education has spread throughout the past century sheds important
light on the significance of these findings above. It has been well-documented that the expansion
of mass education around the world following WWII manifests the emergence of a global
conception of individuals and society such that education is a central component linking a
Meyer et al. 1977, 1992; Ramirez and Boli 1987). Early theorizing posited two paths through
which this occurs: via social movement-led institution-building to create members of civil
society and through state-driven socialization of rationalized productive citizens (Boli et al.
education in terms of schools, teachers, and the educated population (Meyer et al. 1977, 1992).
The models presented here provide evidence that the role of social movement actors in
expanding mass education is not limited to the U.S. and Britain in the 19th century; it also
explains female educational expansion to Asia, Africa, and Latin America better than the state-
driven socialization path. When controlling for missionary, colonial, and cultural factors, the
education at the primary level, and it never achieved statistical significance at the secondary
level.
There is evidence of world polity influence through institutional imprinting at the primary
level as those countries which established primary education after WWII have higher female
62
enrollments than those which established them before. Two of the three countries in this
category, Kenya and Nicaragua, are above the mean in the number of female missionaries per
10,000 capita in 1923. The other country, Malaysia, rapidly expanded education following
independence from England after WWII, building off of prior educational infrastructure. There
are mixed results at the secondary level as post-WWII secondary school establishment is
associated, in some models. Cuba, Haiti, and Honduras all gained independence prior to WWII
but did not establish secondary education until after. Of these, only Honduras is above the
sample mean in female secondary education, and it also had the highest number of missionary
secondary schools of these three, slightly above the mean at 0.025 schools per 10,000 capita.
While institutional imprinting and world polity influences are significant for current levels of
female education, the evidence points to the earlier effect of the Woman’s Missionary Movement
This is consistent with the theoretical and historical section above. The Woman’s
Missionary Movement catalyzed diffusion in female education via female missionary teachers,
legitimized the idea of educating girls, and generated resources for establishing female education
throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America from the middle of the 19th century onward. While I
do not test the effect of the Woman’s Missionary Movement on the diffusion and growth of
influence on the diffusion process prior to WWII with long-run effects in later periods. This is
especially important for resolving some questions about variation within groups of countries that
prior analyses failed to answer. The distribution of female missionaries helps explain variation
63
among countries that grouping by colonizing power or structural location in the world polity
does not explain (Benavot and Riddle 1988; Meyer et al. 1992).16
missionaries embodied early forms of the modern individual and educated citizen in their spread
of female education. The women of the Woman’s Missionary Movement embodied the
organizing into societies to advocate for and to send female missionaries throughout the world.
The individual level characteristics which led to the expansion of mass education in the U.S. and
Great Britain in an earlier era (Meyer et al. 1979) were embodied and passed on through these
missionaries, contributing to the self-generating nature of educational expansion for girls (and
boys). Boli et al point to the significance of such autonomous organizing for educational
expansion, observing that “Education has been generated by worldwide social movements in
modern history” (Boli et al. 1985:146). This study further confirms this observation, in contrast
to others’ emphasis on political elites (LeVine et al. 2001), that social movements are also
primarily to ultra-conservative “anti-” movements in the United States, from analysis of the
WCTU and prohibition movement (Andrews and Seguin 2015; Gusfield 1955) to more
16
Meyer et al (Meyer, Ramirez, and Soysal 1992) identify Puerto Rico, Barbados, and
the Philippines as surprise cases of general educational expansion. When considering the higher
than average presence of Protestant missionaries in these countries, the paradox vanishes.
64
2002; Fetner 2008; Johnson, Scheitle, and Ecklund 2016). Attention to religious social
movements tends to privilege overtly political movements and pays less attention to international
some important lessons on religious movement’s effectiveness. The religious nature of this
movement and the missionaries it birthed gave them a counterintuitive advantage in spreading
modern educational forms and ideals. This has been emphasized with respect to the U.S. and
Great Britain (Meyer et al. 1979), but it was also true, to some degree, in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. More recently, the “religious advantage” has been noted in spreading individual
modernity in Sub-Saharan Africa. In a comparative study of the impact of NGO’s and Protestant
religious group on traditional chieftaincy, kinship, and witchcraft dynamics in Malawi, Swidler
found that Protestant religious groups succeeded where NGO’s failed in developing rationalized
autonomous individuals. Swidler observes, “even when ostensibly modern, rationalizing forms
17
Several Annual Review articles on social movement outcomes (Amenta et al. 2010;
Amenta and Polletta Forthcoming) and all of the “outcome” chapters of the recent Wiley
Blackwell Companion to Social Movements produce very few mentions of religion, religious
outcomes, religious groups other than conservative Protestants and Catholics (Amenta, Andrews,
and Caren 2019; Giugni and Grasso 2019; Passy and Monsch 2019; Taylor and Van Dyke 2019;
see also Earl 2004). These works give little attention to institutional outcomes of religious social
movements, and none of them analyze the outcomes of international or missionary movements.
65
of social life are fully assimilated, as with the elaborate boards and committees that dominate
Malawian organizational life, or the ubiquitous trainings that NGOs sponsor, these activities are
performed in a highly ritualized way that undermines rather than enhances rationalization”
(Swidler 2013:688). On the other hand, only Protestant religious groups (currently, and earlier
missionary efforts as well, Swidler notes), have been able to establish autonomous organizational
forms by challenging traditional obligations that diminish the “agentic” self (Swidler 2013).
Some have even considered colonial Protestant missionaries as “anticolonial militants” as they
opposed both colonial abuses and traditional power structures (Fields 1982; c.f. Woodberry
2004, 2012).
modernity and traditional culture, opposing both, and therefore were able embody and impart a
religious version of the modern educated citizen. While missionary schools in general were
resisted in Muslim societies and gathering girls for school seemed impossible in Asian societies
in which women were often secluded until marriage, the advent of the single female missionary
teacher opened up opportunities and mitigated opposition. As these new kinds of missionaries
embodied both rationalized autonomy and conservative Victorian domestic ideals, they obtained
a middle space between the more radical Western proto-feminism and the more conservative
Muslim, Hindu, or Confucian worldviews (Hunter 1984; Prevost 2009; Reeves-Ellington 2011).
Not only did they provide the means of modernizing women, i.e. education, and new roles for
these educated girls, e.g. as teachers, doctors, etc., but they also demonstrated how women could
be modern and religious. This dynamic, I proposed, was one of the central “religious...and
66
political processes” that led to the expansion of education as a constitutive component of the
expansion, class conflict dynamics and cultural opposition, cultural predispositions, and
integration into the world polity—all demonstrated some effect in the models presented. While
GDP per capita most strongly predicted higher female enrollments, female labor force
participation did not. This calls into question functionalist explanations for expanding female
enrollments at the primary and secondary levels as GDP is also likely an outcome of expanding
education and the legacy of Protestant missionary work. The expansion of female education
Cultural factors are important for expanding female education, as they limit both the
starting point of expansion post-WWII by limiting missionary influence, and because they limit
the rate of expansion. Ethnic fractionalization has not been a significant predictor of growth in
prior studies (Meyer et al. 1977, 1992). Though only marginally significant in several models, it
favor some groups, the more influential ones or the most marginalized ones. Colonizers tended to
18
This indigenization of Protestant missionary efforts post-independence is consistent
with findings concerning the expansion of Protestant and Pentecostal Christianity in former
set groups against each other, particularly in Africa, and controlled the expansion of education to
The significant negative result for historical plow use is an interesting finding in light of
its original use as a measure of gender separated spheres of labor (Alesina et al. 2013). This is a
good example that traditional cultural patterns can both promote and inhibit modern institutions,
as education both provided uplift in some contexts and downgraded women’s equality in others
(De Haas and Frankema 2018). Further, other similar work on the positive association between
prevalence of the bride price custom and local support for construction of new schools for girls
further emphasizes how traditional cultural practices can lead to modernization, without getting
Political factors have been one of the few significant predictors of educational expansion
in general (Meyer et al. 1992), but most have failed to predict gender differences (Cole and Geist
2018). The failure to confirm a significant association between liberal democracy and education
(Acemoglu et al. 2005; Woodberry 2012) in this analysis may be due to the limited sample.
Finally, similar to the literature on educational expansion, independence marks the beginning of
educational expansion as former colonies enter into the world system as independent states. The
al. 1992) and affirms that those colonies which entered the world system following WWII were
more likely to exhibit the dominant nation-state features viz-a-viz female education.
On the whole, these traditional explanations did not wash away the historical effect of the
Woman’s Missionary Movement. Rather, accounting for the outcomes of this movement
contributes significantly to contemporary levels of female education outside the West. This
movement’s efforts at advocacy for female missionaries and recruitment of single women to the
68
mission field sparked a massive movement of female missionaries to the field who started
schools, trained teachers, recruited girls, persuaded parents, and provided models and access to
new vocational roles for women. Measuring this movement in terms of the number of female
missionaries, the number of missionary schools, and the duration of missionary activity, I have
established a consistent association between the movement and contemporary levels of female
education in 76 non-Western countries. This suggests that the Woman’s Missionary Movement
was a primary source of the institutionalization of female education at the primary and secondary
Conclusion
Modern institutions do not necessarily spread through “modern” actors or with “modern”
motivations, and the means by which they spread can take on some very “unmodern”
characteristics. Social movements, of course, are a very modern phenomenon, but religious
missionary movements are not. That this one embodied both is a source of its effectiveness. This
manifestations and outcomes of the women’s movement, the role of religious actors and
movements in expanding modern institutions. In particular, the role of the Woman’s Missionary
Movement ought not to be overlooked when considering the spread of female education and the
availability of new vocations such as teaching, medicine, and religious vocations for women.
While some of the research on expanding education points to the religious origins of, and
religious actors behind, mass education for girls (Baker 1999; Becker and Woessmann 2008;
Meyer et al. 1979), there is little attention to the role of specifically female religious actors in this
expansion. These lacunae are particularly important in assessing the spread of female education
to non-Western countries as these countries typically lag the West in measures of gender equality
but lead the West in measures of religiosity. Based on this study, it seems that the expansion of
modern institutions is cultivated on the ground by specific actors, religious female actors in this
instance. Religious actors seem better poised to spread modern institutions outside the West as
they translate and transfer modern ideals of autonomy, education, and technology within broader
traditional religious frameworks. The resonance is higher, and the pattern of imitation is clearer
as most of the world outside the West is more accustomed to the religious point of view. As
70
Swidler notes concerning secular attempts to modernize, “Unlike the missionaries, who built
what became vibrant new organizational forms of congregational religion (not to mention an
entire institutional infrastructure of hospitals, schools, orphanages, clinics), the NGOs thus far
seem to have left remarkably little behind” (Swidler 2013:691). This has been one account of
what the Woman’s Missionary Movement “left behind,” but there is a need for more.
71
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
1 Female Primary Adjusted
Gross Enrollment Ratio, Mean
(1950-2010)
2 Female Secondary Adjusted 0.84
Gross Enrollment Ratio, Mean
(1950-2010)
3 Female Primary Adjusted 0.74 0.76
Gross Enrollment Ratio, Mean
(1870-1945)
4 Female Secondary Adjusted 0.36 0.58 0.58
Gross Enrollment Ratio, Mean
(1870-1945)
5 lnGDP per capita, Mean 0.70 0.79 0.58 0.41
(1951-2010)
6 Female Labor Force -0.14 -0.24 -0.02 -0.05 -0.39
Participation rate, Mean
(1990-2010)
7 Fertility Rate, Mean (1960- -0.82 -0.86 -0.72 -0.48 -0.69 0.16
2010)
8 Percent Urban Population, 0.59 0.70 0.49 0.34 0.86 -0.37 -0.59
Mean (1950-2010)
9 Intergovernmental 0.08 0.12 0.16 0.26 0.26 -0.30 -0.14 0.38
Organization Ties, Mean
(1950-2010)
10 Polity IV Democracy Score, 0.50 0.48 0.65 0.40 0.35 0.05 -0.56 0.26 0.23
Mean (1950-2010)
11 Gap to CEDAW Ratification -0.34 -0.26 -0.35 -0.15 -0.14 -0.18 0.31 -0.23 -0.36 -0.34
in Months
12 Percentage Historical Plow 0.15 0.30 -0.07 0.18 0.22 -0.40 -0.33 0.12 -0.16 -0.21 0.21
Use
13 Percent European Descent, 0.44 0.39 0.45 0.15 0.41 -0.04 -0.48 0.61 0.31 0.34 -0.40 -0.16
2000
14 Ethnic Fractionalization -0.49 -0.48 -0.35 -0.33 -0.32 0.23 0.55 -0.26 -0.05 -0.22 0.20 -0.38 -0.26
15 Religious Fractionalization 0.10 0.04 0.13 0.06 -0.07 0.42 0.03 -0.17 -0.25 0.06 0.02 -0.28 -0.17 0.20
72
16 Years Exposure to Protestant 0.27 0.31 0.18 0.17 0.12 -0.06 -0.37 0.05 0.08 0.32 -0.15 0.12 0.09 -0.03 0.18
Missions, 1950
17 Female Protestant 0.28 0.18 0.11 -0.03 0.16 0.01 -0.05 0.02 -0.26 0.07 0.13 -0.10 -0.10 0.02 0.36 0.06
Missionaries per 10,000
capita, 1923
18 Number of Missionary 0.08 0.14 0.12 0.02 0.01 0.01 -0.06 -0.09 -0.23 0.18 -0.05 -0.03 -0.20 0.13 0.22 0.17 0.40
Secondary Schools per 10,000
capita, 1923
19 Latitude 0.19 0.40 0.11 0.31 0.38 -0.35 -0.37 0.36 -0.07 -0.08 0.18 0.63 0.16 -0.53 -0.22 0.15 -0.03 -0.15
20 Distance to Coast/Navigable -0.19 -0.03 -0.18 0.02 -0.15 0.18 0.11 -0.10 -0.01 -0.14 0.05 0.00 0.20 0.12 0.00 0.23 -0.16 -0.20 0.31
River (km)
N = 76
73
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