Tracing Threads of Faith: Researching Protestant Women at the New York Public Library

By Sandra Araya Rojas, King’s College London

How did Protestant women navigate and shape spiritual, educational, and political

networks across the Americas in the 19th century?

Thanks to the generous support of the Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS)

PG & PD Research Support Grant, I conducted archival research at the New York

Public Library (NYPL) in late 2024 as part of my doctoral project, Dissident Scribes:

Literary Education and Spiritual Legacies of Protestant Missionary Women in the

Americas (1848–1939).

The NYPL holds extensive and often underexplored collections of 19th- and 20th-

century Protestant print culture. Many of these materials are not available in digital repositories or Latin American archives, making my research trip crucial for accessing rare sources. These documents allowed me to reconstruct the biographies of key missionary women whose sources I analysed in my thesis, and to better understand the broader media culture produced by their religious communities.

During my time at the NYPL, I examined materials that shed light on how Protestant

groups—especially Methodist and Presbyterian denominations—developed a vibrant

textual culture shaped by specific reading and writing practices. The archives

revealed how missionary women negotiated complex gender discourses and

positioned themselves as dissident figures, both within their home congregations and in the patriarchal, Catholic-dominated intellectual environments of Latin America. Rejecting the dominant model of the madre letrada or “angel in the house,” many of these women circumvented official publishing channels and instead prioritised the production and circulation of handwritten manuscripts. In doing so, they carved out spaces of authority that questioned modern Christian constructions of womanhood, turning transcription into a form of spiritual and pedagogical resistance.

This research trip also allowed me to connect with scholars working on similar topics. Professor Bernardita Llanos kindly welcomed me at Brooklyn College, where I delivered a guest lecture on my findings to postgraduate students. The primary sources consulted at the NYPL directly informed that session and enriched the final stages of my doctoral thesis. One of my examiners highlighted how valuable the contextualisation of these materials was. Now that I have completed my PhD, these findings are forming the basis of a forthcoming chapter on floral imagination in the language of 19th-century Methodist women, to be published in an edited volume on women, literature, and religion with Routledge.

I am sincerely grateful to SLAS for enabling this research. The experience deepened

the transnational scope of my project and reaffirmed my commitment to recovering

the intellectual legacies of women whose voices have often been silenced in official

histories.