Abstract
Martinius Borgen, a missionary to Madagascar since 1867, was relocated to the NMS’s Zulu mission in 1885, where he was commissioned as principal of the school for missionary children at Umphumulo. Since his wife, Martha Nikoline Hirsch Borgen, had also been an experienced teacher and housekeeper in charge of a boys’ boarding school at Antananarivo from 1873 to 1882, the couple was regarded as very competent for their new assignment. Soon after their takeover, the Borgens suggested considerable reforms of the school’s curriculum as well as of the boarding arrangements.1 They advocated a modern boarding-school system with a professional staff responsible for the diverse sections of the institution (education, cleaning, laundry, cooking, accounts, gardening, etc.). Their points of view provoked the missionary community, who still preferred the family-like structure of the institution, with the principal and his wife acting as the children’s substitute parents. Martinius Borgen furthermore provoked his colleagues when he presented several proposals related to the school case, written and signed by his wife, at the missionary conference in 1886. His colleagues refused to discuss Mrs Borgen’s proposals, and Mr Borgen had to remove her name from the documents and substitute his own.
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Notes
Robert William Connell, Masculinities, 2nd edition (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 68.
Øystein Gullvȩg Holter, ‘Social Theories for Researching Men and Masculinities’, in Handbook of Studies on Men & Masculinities, ed. Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and R. W. Connell (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005), 21–2.
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Lise Nyhagen Predelli, ‘Marriage in Norwegian Missionary Practice and Discourse in Norway and Madagascar, 1880–1910’, Journal of Religion in Africa 31, no. 1 (2001): 5–8.
For a study of Catholic missionary masculinity in a Nordic context, see Yvonne Maria Werner, ‘Alternative Masculinity? Catholic Missionaries in Scandinavia’, in Christian Masculinity: Men and Religion in Northerns Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Yvonne Maria Werner (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2011).
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In his memoirs Braatvedt praises the work of the missionary wives; see Nils Torbjørnsen Braatvedt, Erindringer fra mitt misjonsliv (Stavanger: Boye og Hinnas boktrykkeri, 1930), 105–07.
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The Norwegian case resembled the development in international missions; see, e.g., the works of Ruth Compton Brouwer, Modern Women Modernizing Men: The Changing Missions of three Professional Women in Asia and Africa, 1902–69 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002)
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Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of their Thought and Practice (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), 255–316
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Tjelle, K.F. (2013). Missionary Masculinity versus Missionary Femininity. In: Missionary Masculinity, 1870–1930. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336361_6
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