Title: Missionaries, Mothers and the Making of Little Miss Mandalay

Submitted by: Penny Edwards, Australian National University

Drawing on policy documents, private papers and public statements by Burmese intellectuals and activists and British missionaries and philanthropists, this paper explores the projection of European concepts of maternity, morality and matrimony in British Burma from the 1880s-1930s.

The paper first examines the promotion of European, bourgeois paragons of femininity and domesticity by Cambridge-educated scholar-administrator Taw Sein Ko in his promouncements on "the Burmese woman" from the 1880s to 1910s. It then examines the inculcation of such notions by missionary and state schools, and their propagation beyond church and classroom through the Burmese Mothers Union and the National Council of Women.

Finally, the paper links these projects to construct "the Burmese woman" with government legislation and colonial praxis designed to keep British women in their place as mothers, missionaries, mid-wives and school-mistresses by excluding them from committees and careers considered unfeminine.

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Carol Burnett
Asialink
The University of Melbourne
Parkville 3052
Victoria AUSTRALIA

Phone: 61 - 3 - 9349 1899
Fax : 61 - 3 - 9347 1768

Email: c.burnett@asialink.unimelb.edu.au