Abstracts / Resúmenes / Resumos / Résumés

S.09 - Nov 11 2021
15:00 – 16:30 Hrs.

Missionaries and the Shaping Trinidad 1868 – 1915: The Contribution of Sarah Morton, Canadian Missionary

Dr. Aleric Josephs
(University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica)

The Christian missionary enterprise to the Caribbean has left an indelible imprint of the region. The story of the contribution of missionaries to the shaping of Caribbean civilization, especially after the ending of slavery, more often than not focus on the male missionary who was often the holder of the title. The fact is the story of the nineteenth century missionary intervention remains incomplete if the contribution of women as a group or as individuals is not centred in the account. Often unrecognised are the many women who stood alongside their husbands and were often innovators of many of the education programmes and strategies of the missionary enterprise, thus making them essential to the shaping of Caribbean society in the years after the ending of slavery. This paper examines the role played by one missionary woman, Sarah Morton, of Nova Scotia and the Canadian Presbyterian Church. She went to Trinidad in the mid-nineteenth century accompanying her husband, John Morton, and spent several decades, not only spreading the Gospel in immigrant communities, but helping to lay a foundation for the education of children of the immigrants. As with other missionary women, she helped in the shaping of Trinidad up to the early twentieth century, leaving a lasting legacy on that nation.