White Baptist missionary women supplied model homes to train Black domestics

Evidence

In 1912 the Woman’s American Baptist Home Mission Society strengthened the domestic science department at the National Training School by supplying a model home for the campus. The building was electrically lit and had a steam-heating plant in the basement. Its spacious floor plan contained a dining room, kitchen, and sun parlor on the second level, and four bedrooms and a bathroom on the third. The WABHMS donated the house on condition that black Baptists be responsible for furnishing it. The building was named the Mary G. Burdette Memorial Home after the first principal of the Missionary Training School in Chicago and long-time leader of white Baptist women in the Midwest. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 1655

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Relates to the immodesty/moral-policing essay theme only loosely; more relevant is how training institutions — even Black self-help ones — absorbed white progressive-era domestic-science ideology as a respectability strategy. The specific building-donation arrangement evidences the white-supremacist paternalism embedded in Black respectability’s domestic training.
• XREF: connects to: White and black Baptist women’s missionary work created cross-racial sisterhoods — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 430; Black and white missionaries jointly imposed Victorian domesticity as core black education. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 458; Black Baptist women saw their domestic teaching role as decisive for racial uplift — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 388 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Black Baptist women saw their domestic teaching role as decisive for racial uplift #complicates (0.85) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 388
• Northern missionaries aimed to discipline black religious emotionalism and home life #corroborates (0.78) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 185
• Black missionary training aimed to reform poor blacks’ habits #qualifies (0.72) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 189