In Island Queens and Mission Wives, Jennifer Thigpen argues persuasively for the centrality of women and gender to the encounter between missionaries and Native Hawaiians in the nineteenth century. ... Thigpen offers new contributions to scholarship on missionary enterprises and colonialism by offering close readings of on-the-ground relationships between missionary and Hawaiian women. She successfully shows how women’s cross-cultural relationships within intimate settings became significant sites for the building of diplomatic and political alliances. ... Through its engagement with and extension of scholarship on gender and colonial encounters, Thigpen’s manuscript is a solid and engaging piece of historical scholarship
