Like Mother, Unlike Daughter: Perspectives and Relationships Between Missionary Women in Korea and Korean Women, 1884-1910

Building off of previous debates concerning missionary women and their interactions with race and gender, this thesis re-examines the perspectives and relationships between missionary women in Korea and Korean women between the years 1884-1910. I will primarily focus on the use of rhetoric in published missionary writings and the private papers of Mattie Wilcox Noble and Edith McRae to argue that the rhetoric of sisterhood was mostly used for recruitment purposes and missionary women conceptualized their relations with Korean women based on the domestic ideologies of motherhood. They saw their relationship with Korean women as similar to that of mother and daughter while at the same time also believing their role to be that of a model of motherhood for Korean women. The Korean women did not always view the relationships in the same way, which made the missionary women uneasy, and often understood their relations on a more professional basis.M.A.2018-11-30 00:00:0