Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii

Twenty-three-year-old Laura Fish Judd left rural Massachusetts in 1827 for the Hawaiian islands, one of eighty young American women who enlisted in the effort to Christianize the islands between 1819 and 1850. Only a month before, after receiving a marriage proposal from a young physician in need of a wife to qualify for mission service, she had written in her diary: "'The die is cast.' I have in the strength of the Lord, consented Rebecca-like--I WILL GO, yes, I will leave friends, native land, everything for Jesus." Laura Judd and other ambitious young women consented to hasty marriages with virtual strangers to achieve their goal of carrying Christ's message to the heathen. As Patricia Grimshaw's compelling study makes clear, these women were driven by a desire for important, independent life-work that went well beyond their expected roles as dutiful wives.