ABSTRACT

Despite several decades of feminist scholarship, the early period of overseas evangelism has remained largely untouched, allowing the myth of the mission as an all male affair to go unchallenged. The paper takes the life story of one particular missionary wife who served on the Church Missionary Society’s first African mission to illustrate the role played by historians’ uncritical use of archival material in perpetuating the male narrative. It focuses on Susanna Klein’s dramatic decision in 1815 to turn whistleblower by exposing numerous missionary misdemeanours, which prompted an inspection visit from London. It traces the mechanism whereby the Society, deeply unsettled by her role in the affair, airbrushed all mention of her from its public records, thus revealing the ease with which female agency could be suppressed to preserve the all male story. In conclusion, a number of lessons are drawn from the unquestioning reliance on the work of others.

摘要

尽管有几十年的女权主义学术研究，但海外布道的早期阶段基本上没有受到影响，这使得宣教作为全男性事务的神话没有受到挑战。这篇论文以一位在教会传教士协会的第一个非洲传教团中服务的特定传教士妻子的生平故事来说明历史学家不加批判地使用档案材料在延续男性叙事方面所起的作用。它着重于苏珊娜·克莱因（Susanna Klein）在 1815 年做出的戏剧性决定，即通过揭露许多传教士的不端行为来成为告密者，这促使伦敦进行了视察。它追溯了该协会对她在这件事中的角色深感不安的机制，从其公共记录中喷绘了所有提及她的信息，从而揭示了可以轻松地压制女性代理以保留所有男性的故事。总之，从毫无疑问地依赖他人的工作中吸取了一些教训。