Sybil Moseley was born in
Westfield, Massachusetts, the daughter of Pliny Moseley and Sophia Pomeroy Moseley. She was an orphan by age twenty, left to support three younger sisters.[1] She was a teacher for nine years as a young woman,[2] some of that time living in
Canandaigua, New York.[3]
Mission years in Hawaii
Hiram Bingham I was a missionary in
Honolulu for twenty years, from 1820 to 1840,[4] and founder of the
Kawaiahaʻo Church.[5] As his wife, Sybil Moseley Bingham shared the work.[6] "I believe God appoints my work," she wrote in her journal in 1823, "and it is enough for me to see that I do it all with an eye to his glory."[7] She is credited with starting the first missionary school in the Hawaiian Islands, teaching Hawaiian adults in her home. The Binghams helped to develop a written
Hawaiian alphabet, and some of the first printed materials in Hawaiian were made for use in her classes. She founded a weekly prayer meeting, attended by more than a thousand Hawaiian women.[2] She also served as an unofficial nurse and midwife among the missionary families.[1]
Sybil Moseley married
Hiram Bingham in 1819; they had met a few weeks before, and boarded a ship for Hawaii twelve days later.[12]Samuel F. B. Morse painted a portrait of the newlyweds before they left New England. Sybil Moseley Bingham and her husband returned to New England in 1841; she was ill with
tuberculosis, and died in 1848, in
Easthampton, Massachusetts.[8]
The Binghams had seven children, all born in the Hawaiian Islands, beginning with Sophia Bingham, the first female American missionary child born on Oahu. Another daughter, Lydia Bingham Coan, wrote a biography of Sybil Moseley Bingham, published in 1895.[13] Two sons died in infancy, in 1823 and 1825;
Hiram Bingham II was the only surviving son. Her grandson
Hiram Bingham III was an explorer in South America, a Senator, and Governor of Connecticut.[1] Her grandson
Edwin Lincoln Moseley was a naturalist. Her great-grandson
Hiram Bingham IV was an American diplomat; another great-grandson,
Jonathan Brewster Bingham, was a Congressman. Living descendants of Sybil Moseley Bingham include musician
Sam Endicott.
The Bingham family's papers, including Sybil's journal of her life in Hawaii in the 1820s,[14] are archived at
Yale University, with another large collection at the
Hawaiian Historical Society and the Hawaiian Mission Children's Society Library in Honolulu, donated by a descendant in 1966.[15][16]
^Dana Robert, "Evangelist or Homemaker? Mission Mission Strategies of Early Nineteenth-Century Missionary Wives in Burma and Hawaii" International Bulletin of Missionary Research 17(1)(1993): 6. via
ProQuest
^Lydia Bingham Coan, A Brief Sketch of the Missionary Life of Sybil Moseley Bingham (Women's Board of Missions for the Pacific Islands 1895).
^Marjorie Shell Wilser, "Living Sacrifices: Women Missionaries' Personal Writings, 1812-1860" (PhD diss., San Jose State University, 1997): 19. via
ProQuest
Michelle Ruth Stonis, "'On Heathen Ground': The Double Bind of Women's Roles in the Sandwich Islands Mission, 1819-1863" (M. A. thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 2005). via
ProQuest
Joy Schulz, "Empire of the Young: Missionary Children in Hawai'i and the Birth of U. S. Colonialism in the Pacific, 1820-1898" (PhD diss., University of Nebraska Lincoln, 2011). via
ProQuest
Jennifer Thigpen, "'Obligations of Gratitude': Gender, Interaction, and Exchange in the Nineteenth-Century Hawaiian Islands" (PhD diss., University of California Irvine 2007). via
ProQuest
Jennifer Thigpen, "'You Have Been Very Thoughtful Today': The Significance of Gratitude and Reciprocity in Missionary-Hawaiian Gift Exchange" Pacific Historical Review 79(4)(November 2010): 545-572. DOI:10.1525/phr.2010.79.4.545 via
ProQuest