“If I Die, I Die”: Women Missionary Workers Among Danes, Armenians, and Turks, 1900-1920
Keywords:
Armenian genocide, missionaries, humanitarianism, gender studies, Christian millenarianism, Armenophilia, Middle East, Turkey, Ottoman EmpireAbstract
Based on extensive studies of archival material and little-known contemporary published sources, this article will explore how and why Danes – famous in certain circles like Maria Jacobsen, virtually unknown like Hansine Marcher and Jenny Jensen, but all women – ended up in remote corners of the Ottoman Empire before and during the Armenian Genocide. They were sent out as field workers for one of the world’s first proper NGOs, the Danish branch of the Evangelical organization Women Missionary Workers. What did these women from the European periphery experience, and how were they perceived at home and abroad during peace, war, massacre, and genocide? Why did the Armenians among all the suffering peoples of the world become their destiny, even after the genocide? And how did they try to make sense of it all, from everyday life and work before 1915 to the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians and the immediate aftermath? The article will put the missionary and experiences into an ideological, institutional, local, regional, and international context, and consider to what extent the Danish women could be considered feminist and humanitarian pioneers.
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