ABSTRACT
Sunday School publications were among the most widely read literature of Protestant children in nineteenth-century Canada. This chapter explores the images of female identity presented to girl readers in three of the most popular Canadian Sunday School periodicals. The periodicals include The Missionary and Sabbath School Record (interdenominational), The Children's Record (Presbyterian), and The Sunbeam (Methodist), which offer three pervasive figures to represent femininity: the Christian mother, the Christian girl, and the so-called heathen girl in foreign lands. The female missionary provided a powerful alternative to the domestic, meek, victimized, and generally passive qualities of the other women and girls featured in Sunday School periodicals. Evangelism remained the central and most important aspect of Christian femininity, yet other qualities such as domesticity, motherhood, and passivity were replaced with educational achievement, adventurousness, and leadership in the lives of the missionary women Canadian girls followed through their Sunday School publications.
