Making “Womenly Women” or “Servants of Civilization”

Abstract

This article investigates how white educators used American education in an effort to socially engineer Hawaiian acceptance of U.S. control over the islands. Examining school reports, journal articles, and official correspondence from the Kamehameha School for Girls, I explore the various strategies principal Ida M. Pope used to promote white middle-class ways of homemaking and mothering, in an effort to undermine her Native Hawaiian students’ Indigenous identities and convert them into docile Hawaiian Americans. Despite Pope’s language of female empowerment, she harbored racist attitudes toward Native Hawaiians and produced an institutional climate hostile to Indigenous identity. This article builds on previous work on white women’s maternalism in Native American boarding schools to highlight how themes of white feminity, U.S. empire, and settler colonialism manifested at the Kamehameha School for Girls. More broadly, it reveals the role of white women in Hawai‘i as agents of colonial control who actively labored toward normalizing U.S. occupation and empire.

“That’s Where I Learned Really How Sex Works:” Asian American and Pacific Islander Men who are Attracted to Men Supplementation of Sexual and Romantic Education through Media

“…These schools where designed, in the missionaries minds, to civilize and uplift the 'savage' races though disrupting and dismantling the more fluid sexual and romantic knowledge of the Indigenous populations and enforcing the ridged Euroamerican definitions of marriage, heterosexuality, and gender roles (Morris (Kapa'ihiahilina), 2006;Okihiro, 2008;Silva, 2004;Sykes, 2014;Wood, 1999). To promote this end many of these schools were set up to separate the indigenous populations from their family groups through the boarding school process (Davis, 2001;Okihiro, 2008;Piccard, 2013;Taira, 2023;Trask, 1999). Once separated from their families, in many cases forcibly, indigenous people where provided a strict, regimented, and at times deadly education that promoted Euroamerican gender and sexuality roles along with an industrious and servitude disposition for the Indigenous populations (Davis, 2001;Okihiro, 2008;Piccard, 2013;Taira, 2023;Trask, 1999).…”

“…To promote this end many of these schools were set up to separate the indigenous populations from their family groups through the boarding school process (Davis, 2001;Okihiro, 2008;Piccard, 2013;Taira, 2023;Trask, 1999). Once separated from their families, in many cases forcibly, indigenous people where provided a strict, regimented, and at times deadly education that promoted Euroamerican gender and sexuality roles along with an industrious and servitude disposition for the Indigenous populations (Davis, 2001;Okihiro, 2008;Piccard, 2013;Taira, 2023;Trask, 1999). Thus, these boarding school in separating the children from their parents and communities worked to break the continuation of Indigenous education and knowledge, and impose the Euroamerican education system and knowledge, furthering colonialism (Davis, 2001;Morris (Kapa'ihiahilina), 2006;Okihiro, 2008;Piccard, 2013;Silva, 2004;Sykes, 2014;Taira, 2023;Trask, 1999).…”

“…Sexual and romantic education tended to push the prospect of saving oneself until marriage and breeding with what the dominate society viewed as 'right type of people' or 'civilized people' (Moran, 2000;Okihiro, 2008;Taira, 2023). For the educational leaders at the time these terms excluded People of Color, Indigenous populations, the disabled, Asian and those from Southern Europe (Dolmage, 2017;Kaniecki, et al, 2023;Moran, 2000;Okihiro, 2008;Taira, 2023).…”

“…Sexual and romantic education tended to push the prospect of saving oneself until marriage and breeding with what the dominate society viewed as 'right type of people' or 'civilized people' (Moran, 2000;Okihiro, 2008;Taira, 2023). For the educational leaders at the time these terms excluded People of Color, Indigenous populations, the disabled, Asian and those from Southern Europe (Dolmage, 2017;Kaniecki, et al, 2023;Moran, 2000;Okihiro, 2008;Taira, 2023). For these excluded populations schools and asylums were designed to reduce their sexual interactions through the promotion of chastity or forced sterilization, fearing that the 'uncivilized' people would out breed the civilized (Kaniecki, et al, 2023;Moran, 2000;Taira, 2023).…”

“…The sexual health aspect of the programs was never removed from the curriculum, but the topic's prevalence was reduced further in the 1970s, when the worry of unwanted white teen pregnancy grew. While pregnancy of any type for non-white populations was continued to be controlled through the above-mentioned eugenics programs (Kaniecki, et al, 2023;Moran, 2000;Taira, 2023), white teen pregnancy became a worry when the definition of adolescence, the stage between childhood and adulthood, was expanded to include younger white women (Hall et al, 2016;Moran, 2000). This new concern created a goal of the system to reduce the rates of pregnant teens in white woman (Hall et al, 2016).…”