Abstract
In addition to work and all-male associations, the home or the family is an area where masculinity is constructed.1 Like the concept of masculinity, ‘home’ and ‘family’ are social constructions that make sense only in terms of historically and culturally specific shared understandings. Nevertheless, boys and men ‘come from’ and ‘have’ families. In Western tradition, boys are generally expected to reject their mothers and leave their families in order to achieve manhood, but to become respectable men they are also expected to return to family life after a time to create and lead families of their own. Yet modern Western notions of masculinity, according to the social scientists Michele Adams and Scott Coltrane, have ‘much less to do with everyday life in domestic settings than they do with accomplishments in extra-familial arenas such as business, sports, or politics’.2 The ideal of separate spheres that emerged during the Victorian age advocated that men and women were part of diverse social worlds: men inhabited the public sphere and women the private sphere. Adams and Coltrane assert that throughout the twentieth century the putatively separate public and private spheres continued to reflect and reproduce gender differences and perpetuate gender equality. They claim that the ideal of separate spheres explains modern Western men’s difficulties in ‘being in’ their families and their resistance to being closely connected with the domestic.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 2.
Michele Adams and Scott Coltrane, ‘Boys and Men in Families: The Domestic Production of Gender, Power, and Privilege’, in Handbook of Studies on Men & Masculinities, ed. Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn and R. W. Connell (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005), 230.
Anders Olsen, Misjonsprest Karl Larsen Titlestad: Det Norske Missionsselskaps senior (Bergen: A/S Lunde & Co.s Forlag, 1929), 14–16.
Jørgen Lorentzen, ‘Fedrene’, in Män i Norden: Manlighet och modernitet 1840–1940, ed. Claes Ekenstam and Jørgen Lorentzen (Hedemora: Gidlund, 2006), 150–54.
Kristin Fjelde Tjelle, ‘Misjonærenes barn — foreldrenes eller misjonens ansvar? Misjonærbarn i NMS, ca 1840–1940’ in Med hjertet på flere steder: Om barn, misjon og ferkulturell oppvekst, ed. Tomas Drønen and Marianne Skjortnes (Trondheim: Tapir Akademisk Forlag, 2010), 36–40.
The same happened at the NMS’s institutions for missionary children in Madagascar, China and Stavanger; see Kristin Fjelde Tjelle, ‘Misjonaerbarna pȩ Solbakken’, in Med hjertet på fere steder: Om barn, misjon og ferkulturell oppvekst, ed. Tomas Dronen and Marianne Skjortnes (Trondheim: Tapir Akademisk Forlag, 2010), 86.
Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 2nd edn (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 80–104.
Karina Hestad Skeie, ‘Building God’s Kingdom: The Importance of the House to Nineteenth Century Norwegian Missionaries in Madagascar’, in Ancestors, Power and History in Madagascar, ed. Karen Middleton (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1999), 88.
Erik Sidenvall, The Making of Manhood among Swedish Missionaries in China and Mongolia, c. 1890–c. 1914 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2009), 159.
Minutes from MC 1897, MA-MHS, HA/G.sekr.40/Box 39 A/Jacket 4. A home for Norwegian missionary children was first purchased in Greyville. It was sold some years later and a new home built in Bellevue Road. In 1928 a house was bought in Seaforth Avenue. Ernst Hallen, Nordisk Kirkeliv Under Sydkorset: Festskrift i anledning Den Norsk Lutherske Kirkes 50 Aarsjubileum i Durban 14 mars 1880–14 mars 1930 (Durban: The Mission Press, 1930), 58.
Robert Morrell, From Boys to Gentlemen: Settler Masculinity in Colonial Natal, 1880–1920 (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 2001), 48–77.
Anna Fredén, Missionärernas barn (Stockholm: Svenska Kyrkans Diakonistyrelses Bokförlag, 1918), 36–7.
Walthamstow Hall, Home and School for the Daughters of Missionaries, and Eltham College, School for the Sons of Missionaries; see Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 154–62.
See the case of Norway in Gro Hagemann, ‘De stummes leir? 1800–1900’, in Med kjønnsperspektiv på norsk historie: Fra vikingtid til 2000-årsskiftet, ed. Ida Blom and Solvi Sogner (Oslo: Cappelen akademisk forlag, 2005), 157–250.
Tosh, A Man’s Place; Shawn Johansen, Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America (New York: Routledge, 2001).
Tomas Berglund, Det goda faderskapet i svenskt 1800-tal (Stockholm: Carlssons, 2007)
Ingie Hovland, Mission Station Christianity: Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand, Southern Africa 1850–1890 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Kristin Fjelde Tjelle
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tjelle, K.F. (2013). Family Men. In: Missionary Masculinity, 1870–1930. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336361_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336361_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46346-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-33636-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)