'To Save the Girls for Brighter and Better Lives': Presbyterian Missions and Women in the South of Vanuatu: 1848-1870

IT HAS OFTEN BEEN ARGUED IN RELATION TO THE PROJECTS OF DEVELOPMENT AGENCIES in post-colonial states that the effect of European capitalist expansions has been the 'domestication' of women. What I examine here is the claim earlier made by Boserup and Leacock that this is but the latest phase in a long process beginning early in the colonial period. In the Pacific, Christian missions were crucial agents in the process of Western colonisation and many were zealously dedicated to the 'domestication' of indigenous women. Promoting novel models of women's domesticity was often part of broader missionary projects for salvation and conversion. But quite how far such projects accomplished their aims bears closer study - in terms of the missionaries' cultural background, the impediments to the realisation of Christian family life in the colonies, and the degrees to which local women adopted, transformed or resisted attempts to 'domesticate' them.