Rev. Simpson's ‘Improper Liberties’: Moral Scrutiny and Missionary Children in the South Seas Mission

This article explores a case of alleged sexual abuse, by a missionary, of a number of missionary daughters in the South Seas mission. The rich material connected with this case allows for a powerful insight into the fabric of life of missionaries and their children, and illuminates various levels of moral scrutiny and social supervision that were embedded in the mission context. Parental moral scrutiny was the most effective mechanism to neutralise the internal threat posed by the potential deviance of missionary children. The levels of moral scrutiny in the mission were unevenly implemented, however, and the asymmetry of scrutiny that occurred (whereby missionary children were subjected to intense social and moral supervision, while missionaries themselves were permitted a certain level of deviation from spiritual and cultural norms) reflected the hierarchies of power and social dynamics of the mission context. This case led to the systemisation and legitimisation of both these scrutinies and these asymmetries, while further implementing new levels of social control, directed both at the behaviour of missionary children and the efficiency of parental moral scrutiny enacted by their parents.     

Malthus,gender and the demarcation of ‘dangerous’ bodies in 1996 US welfare reform

This article argues that populationism as a gendered narrative provides a crucial rhetorical architecture for welfare reform debates in the USA during the 1990s. Populationism, which Joni Seager defines as ‘the dogma and the rhetoric of population alarmism and population control,’ subtly legitimized efforts to control and marginalize poor women's bodies in the context of welfare reform. The populationism underlying welfare reform hinges on a deep fear of engulfing social chaos if ‘we’ do not check the fertility of poor women, and particularly women of color. This article historically situates contemporary welfare politics by tracing in some detail how Malthus' original writings on population were constitutively linked to debates about ‘poor relief’ in early nineteenth century England. Exploring the gendered linkages between Malthus and social welfare policy in the 1800s allows us to understand how Malthus continues to haunt discourses about social welfare in the 1990s and beyond, with direct consequences for poor women and particularly poor women of color.     

French Immersion Programs: New Identities and Recurring Concerns

This study focuses upon French immersion programs, an educational innovation which seeks to produce bilingual students in Canada. As part of publicly supported school systems, the program recruits from non-French speaking families. Research findings bearing on the nature of the program, its organization and its eventual outcome are examined. Three problems are discussed: availability and accessibility to the program, competition and conflict arising from it and its meaning for French-Canadian communities.     

Pattern Analysis Based on Type, Orientation, Size, and Shape

Quantifying the pattern of geographically defined areas has proven useful in analyzing and understanding geographic processes. Pattern analyses most commonly used by geographers measure the spatial distribution of nonspatial variables at each point or in each area. The objective of this research is to develop and assess a pattern analysis for area-class maps that considers more than the nonspatial attributes when describing a spatial pattern. We examine whether similar geographic areas—similar with respect to attribute type and several geometric properties—exhibit particular spatial patterns (e.g., clustered, random, or dispersed). The additional attributes we include are orientation, size, and shape. We refer to the method as TOSS, reflecting the T ype, O rientation, S ize, and S hape of areas. The goal of considering these additional attributes is to capture the geometric aspects of pattern that other approaches to pattern analysis do not. Sets or groups of similar areas are created using cluster analysis, based on a variable standardization score using the Gower coefficient of similarity. The spatial distributions for each set of geographic objects are then calculated using nearest neighbor analysis. To test the effectiveness of the TOSS method, results from pattern analysis and the TOSS method are qualitatively and quantitatively compared. The TOSS method offers a novel approach to pattern analysis.     

Forging the Missionary Ideal: Gender and the Family in the Church Missionary Society Gleaner

The missionary press in Britain served not only to diffuse knowledge, but to create identity. For an emergent evangelical middle‐class, notions of masculinity, femininity, and family were negotiated and refined through the representations of missionaries and their lives in the field. Evangelical identity was configured through the ideologies and practices of gender and domesticity in the mission context. This article explores the representations of gender and the family in the philanthropic press in Britain through the case study of the Church Missionary Society Gleaner. For the missionary public at home, the pages of the missionary press contained the exemplary normativity of gender, culture, and family. In forging those ideals through the work and representation of mission endeavour, notions of gender and family became both implicitly and explicitly linked to Empire. By once again taking the colony and metropole into the same analytical space, we can consider the ways in which colonialism “out there” structured Britishness not only “at home.” but in the heart of the home as well.