Robin Winks complained in volume V of the Oxford History of the British Empire that women’s studies had made a negligible impact on imperial history. Scholars of gender and women’s experience had done little to transform the broader field. Moreover, their debates had been conducted ‘in a side area, as though the issues had been marginalized’. Nonetheless, he predicted that the quantity and scope of the work on women was bound to grow—as indeed it has. Certainly the first four volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire are barely touched by contemporary feminist scholarships (a fault partially repaired by the companion volume Gender and Empire). Mainstream histories of Christian missions have paid even less attention to women and the insights of feminist scholars. Even academic mission histories have slighted women’s experiences. This absence is remarkable, for since the proliferation of feminist critiques of humanities and the social sciences in the 1970s, much ground-breaking work has been completed on the role of women in missions and Empire. This chapter maps the trajectory of historical writing about women in missions from its origins in hagiography to current work informed by post-colonial theoretical insights. It delineates key findings, points to omissions requiring attention, and attempts to evaluate the significance of such studies for the field as a whole.
Resources for the history of missionary women over the last two centuries are diverse and dispersed, reflecting the wide variety of experience depending on marital status, age, personal capacity, and the possibilities for women’s work offered by different denominations. Recent scholarship on women enhances our understanding of missions as a whole, probing the complex ways by which women within the mission household economies promoted the conversion, education, and training of indigenes in Western forms. Another part of the story is the gradual emergence of white women as professionals deriving satisfactions as salaried workers, albeit not among their own compatriots but among indigenous peoples in exotic sites. The recognition of both women’s agency and the fundamentally gendered nature of the mission enterprise is integral to the future of imperial history and the history of missions.
In 1907 a British schoolmaster, Charles Hayward, compiled a volume on missionary heroines as examples to the Christian faithful. One vignette described the tragic but triumphant life of Mrs Johnston, wife of the Wesleyan Methodist missionary George Johnston, who served among African slaves on plantations of the West Indies from 1807 to 1811. On the eve of her voyage from England, Mrs Johnston declared herself yearning ‘to carry the Glad Tidings to the slaves and may God bless my labours’. She cheerfully faced the trials she knew were in store, confident that in God’s sight the soul of one man, however wretched and despised, was equal to any other. She found hardship beyond her imaginings. On her deathbed, stricken in Dominica with ‘swamp fever’, she urged her husband to persevere in the grand cause: ‘My motto is: ‘‘A sinner saved by grace. A brand plucked from the fire’.’’ George Johnston informed his mission society that his deceased wife had contributed valiantly to the mission, including ably filling his place when he was away on Sundays: ‘both the Church and myself have suffered’. She had been ‘a true help-meet for me in body and in soul’.
From the outset of the expansionary era of British missions in the late eighteenth century missionaries and mission organizations acknowledged the significant work of women. By the late nineteenth century white women outnumbered the men in imperial missions as wives, teachers, nurses, and nuns, not only from Britain and British ex-colonies such as Canada and Australia, but also from the United States and continental Europe. Hayward’s collection was designed to show how women like Mrs Johnston worked heroically until old age or death, converting, educating, and ministering to the bodily needs of non-Christian people the world over. Although married women were not officially commissioned as missionaries, they were all expected to work where and when they were able. They are under-represented in archives, because, unlike their husbands, they had no obligation to submit reports and journals. Single women, on the other hand, sustained the same commitments as the men. Mission journals printed news about them and mission wives as a means of interesting the Christian public, especially fundraisers, in the broader work.
Although women figured in anecdotal fashion in early institutional and popular mission histories like Hayward’s, their activities were not subjected to serious scholarly analysis before the Second World War, and the writing of mission history was largely left to educated Christian laymen outside academia. From the mid-twentieth century, when professionally trained scholars took an interest, the absence of women from mainstream accounts was notable. A recent historiographical survey of mission histories notes that most historians ignored women’s experiences. It was acknowledged that male missionaries had wives, who kept house, entertained visitors, taught local women, and often died prematurely; despite single women’s greater potential agency, their special concerns were often presented as anomalous, and in any case they often married and disappeared from view into the marital household. Because women’s letters went mainly to relatives rather than to society headquarters, they are under-represented in mission archives, a problem compounded by a lack of conceptual frameworks for representing the wives’ existence. Women’s daily work was relegated to the margins and divorced from the broader narrative of the establishment of missions, which centred on conversion and the nurturing of new churches.
Two developments in humanities research outside the area of mission history aroused scholarly interest in the domestic arena of missionary work. These were the rise of a new kind of feminism and a shift within anthropological scholarship away from examining non-European cultures to the study of cultural exchanges. From the 1970s feminists promoted the case for the inclusion of women in mainstream history to a sceptical male- dominated profession. Rather than studying exceptional ‘women worthies’, the new generation of scholars sought to centre women in their disciplines. Mainstream history focused, they suggested, on a taken-for-granted search for meta-narratives dealing with political and economic transformations and the actors—almost always men—associated with them. Feminist scholars countered this paradigm on a number of fronts: women were often closely connected to these stories but were ignored; most of the significant questions about how and why changes took place and their outcomes relied on inappropriately marginalized cultural and social histories in which women figured equally with men; finally, gender, or the relationships of men and women, constituted an analytical category concomitant with class and race, and should substantially inform any history. The new women’s history would offer a usable past not only to women, but also to men, as the discipline transformed the meta-narrative to develop inclusive human perspectives.
Mission history remained largely unaffected by this movement until the 1980s, as few scholars in the area had been affected by feminist theory. Moreover, some new works on female missionaries perpetuated the mode of missionary propaganda by seeking to rescue forgotten women from obscurity and demonstrate their significance. Thus, in her 1988 overview Guardians of the Great Commission, Ruth Tucker wrote: ‘it is a credit to women missionaries around the world that the influence of Christianity on the family and on the role of women in the home has had significant impact—especially in some non-Western cultures, where women have traditionally had a very low status in society’. The first works to argue that the missionary enterprise had played a critical role in transforming the whole of society emerged from the United States, whose feminist historians took a greater interest in women and religion than those of other Western nations. Jane Hunter’s The Gospel of Gentility and Patricia Hill’s The World their Household were particularly influential in exploring the attraction of missions and laying out a framework for research. North American scholars such as Dana Robert have continued to lead the field in examining white women missionaries as historical agents.
Also in the 1980s, anthropologists and a new breed of social historians began to write about missions as a prime site wherein the records of daily behaviour could be studied. Those with an ethnographer’s eye set about examining women’s daily rounds, their support for male missionaries, and single women’s agency, as dramatizing European ideas of femininity to local people. These scholars established a narrative of women in the mission held to set beside the general male accounts. This work sees missions as a key site for observing cultural conflict—one in which gender relations and the household were crucial battlegrounds. Much of this ethnographically driven historical work has focused on British, Australian, and American missions in the Pacific. Diane Langmore’s 1989 study of missionaries in Papua focused on men and women, both Protestant and Catholic, in order to expose the gendered underpinnings of missions. In the same year Patricia Grimshaw’s Paths of Duty: American Missionary Women in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii appeared together with an influential collection of historical and anthropological chapters, Family and Gender in the Pacific edited by fellow Australians Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre. A most significant collection on women and missions with a strong focus on Africa emerged in 1993 from collaboration between historians and anthropologists—one that accorded equal weight to missionaries and to the indigenous subjects of mission. Six years later a similar collection demonstrated in its statement of purpose how the field of study had developed:
We focus on missions first because missionaries usually worked closer to local communities than other colonial agents, often with a moral agenda that provided a broad critique of local gender regimes. Further, because of their concerns with women, children, and family, missionary groups were more likely than others to include Western women among their workers and thus to face more immediately the destabilizing challenges that colonial experience posed to their own ways of organizing relations between women and men.
This collection also reflects a third development in the study of women and missions, which is the use ofmission archives to explore the relation between gender, race, and Empire. Since the late 1980s feminist scholars have been forced to respond to post-colonial critiques questioning the role of white women as agents of mission enterprises. Were women’s historians bent on discovering white women’s significance in Empire-building to valorize their roles? Should they not instead be engaged in teasing out white women’s complicity with white men in sustaining colonial power structures at the expense of indigenous people? Post-colonial historians linked mission women directly to the exercise of colonial power and the treatment of colonized peoples. Missions as a whole were recast as a destructive enterprise in which white women played a part. The influence of post-colonial studies can be seen in Ruth Compton Brouwer’s study of Canadian Presbyterian women in Indian missions, where success in conversion and cultural transmission was directly related to exploitation of local crises such as famine or disease and the subsequent removal of children to mission stations. Similarly, Myra Rutherdale’s magisterial Women and the White Man’s God shows how ideas and practices determined by competing concepts of gender and race affected all those involved in the mission encounter in Canada, not only white female missionaries.
Inspired by the theoretical work of Edward Said and other studies of the impact of colonialism on the colonizers, historians such as Antoinette Burton, Judith Rowbotham, and Susan Thorne focus on linkages between events in the metropole and the overseas Empire, for example, between British women’s attempts to advance their own emancipation through a slanted representation of the colonial ‘others’ who were to be ‘liberated’ and converted. Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867 (2002) casts a fresh light on the work of humanitarians in Britain, and the interactions between British and colonial vested interests. Her study stresses the racialized and gendered grounding of missions in the metropole and in the West Indies, in ways that foreshadow a complete reintegration of mission history into imperial history. Each of these revisionist historians has emphasized that women’s contributions to missions were an integral part of the wider movement whereby women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries asserted the significance of domesticity and the private sphere, while striving for greater autonomy. Thus, women missionaries carried a European feminine and domestic agenda of Western modernity to indigenous peoples, exemplifying new knowledge, technologies, and practices that were revolutionizing their home societies.
Women’s historians justify singling out women as a discrete subject in history by pointing to the distinctive trajectory of their lives and the need for a wholesale revision of our notion of what topics are appropriate objects of historical study. These objectives are amply illustrated in studies of the life experiences of married women in mission households. Although, from the earliest days of the missionary enterprise, women believed they were called to enter the mission field by the same evangelical imperatives that prompted men to leave the British Isles, they were not treated in the same manner. White middle-class women across the Empire were prompted to consider missionary service by the growing body of literature on ‘missionary heroines’, which simultaneously encouraged the raising of funds by women to support the missionary cause. This literature frequently constructed the subject of missionary efforts as savage, depraved, and ignorant, while portraying the white woman as an adventurous and brave soul who overstepped the boundaries of home and hearth, sacrificing family life to bring the light of the gospel to the unenlightened. Indigenous girls were represented as in desperate need of moral rescue through the provision of domestic education and basic literacy. Meanwhile, the representation of women who died on the mission field in tragic circumstances constructed a valiant image of martyrdom that further confirmed the validity of female missionary work. Women missionaries thus made a substantial impact upon the imaginations of generations of children in Britain and the settler colonies.
Only in the nineteenth century did women begin to enter the mission field in significant numbers, first as mission wives, and then in their own right, reluctantly accepted by the major missionary societies (sometimes in the hopes that they would marry widowers in the field and hence retain valuable men in place) or through small, single-purpose societies. By the middle of the nineteenth century a wife was considered a necessary asset for the would- be missionary, even though married women were neither directly commissioned by the societies nor paid a separate wage. Furthermore, single women missionaries in organizations such as the London Missionary Society (LMS) were expected to resign their commission upon marriage, even as they carried on as voluntary workers.
Wives were expected to work, and work they did, but the method and mode of their work distinguished them from male missionaries, who pursued conversion through preaching, teaching, and negotiation: work more easily recognized in a capitalist society as deserving financial remuneration. The work of missionary wives took place within a household economy of pre-industrial times, work designated as auxiliary to that of men, but which was nevertheless essential to the maintenance of European domestic family life, to the creation of a Christian community, and to the wider cause of proselytization. Missionary wives performed manifold duties in respect to sexuality, childbearing, and child-rearing; housewifery, ranging across obtaining food, cooking, cleaning, sewing, nursing the sick, maintaining a vegetable garden, keeping poultry, and growing vegetables to training and supervising others to assist in these tasks; and furthering the mission work which brought in their husbands’ stipends. Mission societies also expected wives to take on the additional tasks of teaching local women and children the skills of European domesticity (however foreign to their own culture) and to teach reading, infused, of course, by spiritual truth.
This burden is well represented by the life of Marianne Williams, an exemplary missionary wife who worked with her husband, Henry, at the Paihia mission in New Zealand (established in 1823). Prior to departure she had studied nursing, as well as the Moravian missionary principles of education. Once located in the Bay of Islands, she exemplified European family ideals, raising eleven children of her own, dispensing medicine and hospitality, and attempting to domesticate indigenous women by running a school for Maori girls, bringing them into her home to learn cooking, needlework, and the art of housewifery. Yet her attempts to impose her version of womanly behaviour met with resistance: Maori simply walked out of her home if she berated them verbally, leaving her without aid in what was a large household even for missionary families. Although Williams could control her own body and those of her children, she had to battle, cajole, and frequently acknowledge complete failure in her attempts to get Maori women to dress and behave as Europeans in accordance with her vision of the outward signs of Christian belief. As Kathryn Rountree observes, at the core of her work as a missionary wife was the colonization of the bodies of Maori as a preparation for the colonization of their souls.
The perceived need of male missionaries for companionship and domestic support, together with underlying fears of sexual misconduct, quickly made a wife a necessary asset, leading some mission societies to provide men with suitable companions just prior to departure. The controversy surrounding the early nineteenth-century LMS missionaries who married or had liaisons with indigenous women in southern Africa was a reminder of the perils single men posed for missionary societies, which relied for finance upon a culture increasingly intolerant of interracial marriage. And if single women faced one major threat to their independent work in the early phases of a mission other than finding themselves swiftly transformed into wives, it was their co-option to the role of right-hand help to the hard-pressed mission wife and mother whose urgent need, in the absence of sisters and mothers, for Western skilled help was bottomless. Moreover, single women who arrived at mission stations against all odds in the period prior to the 1880s found the alternative of marriage quickly pressed upon them since few men ever contemplated staying in the field unless they could marry there. Single women often released single or recently widowed men from the labour of returning to the home base to acquire a wife, or the disappointment of abandoning their calling altogether. James and Matilda Ward arrived on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait as Moravian missionaries in 1890. Before long their colleague Nicholas Hey had married Mrs Ward’s sister Mary Ann and the two women could model European gender order; although after James Ward’s death Matilda continued on, working in her own right under the auspices of the Victorian Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union alongside her sister and brother-in-law.
Because childbearing frequently undermined their constitutions, the health and energy of wives were more deeply affected than their husbands by migration to new and challenging communities and cultures. Wives were held responsible for sustaining a model household and an exemplary family, which increased their personal insecurity. Missionaries had to cope with difficult living conditions, often at odds with their socio-economic background, and come to grips with being self-reliant in every matter from erecting a suitable house to finding food and water. Improvements to their residences might come at the cost of goodwill, however, if local people viewed them more as wealthy and powerful masters rather than as the mere purveyors of the gospel. But improved conditions were the basis of good health for women and young children if they were to be anything other than a burden and worry for the mission. Mortality of wives and their babies was high, and those who survived the early years could be plagued by ill health for decades. Mary Hill and her husband, Micaiah, worked for the LMS at Berhampur in Bengal from 1824 to 1847, during which time two of their children died. Mary suffered from exhaustion owing to her work as a nurse and schoolteacher and the hardships of finding suitable accommodation in an unaccustomed climate.
Raising children according to European custom was very difficult. The lack of money, food, the trappings of domesticity, and the company of other Europeans imposed a constant strain on mothers who sought to communicate British culture to their own children as well as to the objects of the missionary enterprise. Servants might be employed in the mission house, who spoke their own language to missionary children, and might win greater affection than their parents could. For these reasons missionary parents often sent their children to boarding schools in their country of origin to assure a successful future—good marriages for the girls, and professional employment for the boys. The pain of separation from children imposed another burden on wives like Mary Hill, who felt compelled to send her eldest son back to England on account of his frequent illnesses.
The mission field severely strained the gendered division of labour between husband and wife thought appropriate in British societies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While men might occasionally take on temporary roles as carers for children and the sick in the absence of women, their wives frequently left the domestic realm for more public activities. This was especially so prior to the arrival in the 1880s of large numbers of single women missionaries, as wives ran schools and instructed indigenous women on the skills of European housewifery from cooking to sewing. At times any semblance of Victorian domestic ideology disappeared in practice, despite the belief that this was the model that Christian converts should imitate. Some wives found themselves alone in charge of entire missions stations. The British Columbian bishop William Ridley was forced to go to Ottawa in 1884 and then to England to deal with a disobedient Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary. His wife, Jane, stayed behind to run the vacant Hazelton mission station through the Canadian winter. After death she was eulogized for her bravery in stepping outside the boundaries of feminine activity, and for her apparent success in working among the Tsimshian people. The pattern was repeated across the Empire, as husbands departed for extensive periods of itinerant preaching, leaving wives to replace them in mission churches. In the 1890s two Fiji missionary wives, Minnie Burns and Lydia Brown, even went so far as to preach in their husbands’ absence. Wives quietly contributed to these activities, even when beset by pregnancies, miscarriages, and the need to nurse the sick. No matter their skills or load, if wives were to gain official approval, however, they needed to maintain a modest, self-deprecatory demeanour that translated into virtual invisibility in mission reports and that might one day be praised in the obituary columns. By proving they could survive both physically and culturally on colonial frontiers, missionary wives helped pave the way for the employment of women as missionaries in their own right. There was, however, stiff resistance to the concept of appointing women missionaries throughout the nineteenth century, which restricted the opportunities available to most unmarried women. In the 1840s Bishop Wilson of Calcutta famously objected ‘in principle to single ladies coming out unprotected to so distant a place with a climate so unfriendly, and with the almost certainty of their marrying within a month of their arrival... the whole thing is against apostolic maxim, ‘‘I suffer not a woman to speak in the church’’ ’.
While the major missionary societies continued to debate the subject of women as professional evangelists throughout the late nineteenth century, a range of smaller organizations did offer opportunities. The Society for Promoting Female Education in the East, founded in 1834 as a response to the concern of both missionaries and the Ladies’ Society of Calcutta, and the Indian Female Normal School and Instruction Society (1859) were two such groups, employing women as schoolteachers, while the unmarried relations of male missionaries might accompany their brothers and fathers to the mission field. A major change in mission policy on women occurred in 1878, when, despite public criticism, Hudson Taylor engaged single female missionaries from Britain and the colonies to work in teams for his China Inland Mission. Once women had been admitted to the major missionary institutions, their numbers rapidly multiplied. It is a central if unacknowledged fact of mission history that by the end of the nineteenth century the largest group of missionaries were not clergy or married couples, but single women. In 1909 the CMS had 1,390 European staff on its books, 414 of whom were clergymen, 152 laymen, 386 missionary wives, and 438 single women.22 For these latter women, missionary work offered a viable alternative to marriage, based on the same principle of self-sacrifice to a higher cause, while for would-be doctors and teachers, missions offered career prospects not available at home.
Two factors gave missionary organizations compelling reasons to facilitate women’s participation in proselytization in the second half of the nineteenth century. First, a large number of single women felt called to leave Britain, the United States, and the British settler colonies to spread the Christian gospel; and they were able to call upon the particular support of other white women as fund-raisers. Secondly, the major missionary societies recognized that women could go to places inaccessible to men and thus attempt new forms of proselytization.
The catchphrase of women’s missionary endeavours from the midnineteenth century to the First World War was ‘women’s work for women’, as both a justification for and description of their work in the field. The female missionary organizations pursued the ideology of separate spheres of activity, focusing on the tasks of teaching girls, domestic training, modelling Victorian and Edwardian womanhood, providing medical care in the form of nursing, and entering exclusive female spaces. Recruitment of female missionaries could be class-based in a way that selection of male missionaries generally was not. The LMS Ladies’ Committee interviewed applicants for mission service and discriminated between them on the basis of educational qualifications and the ability to maintain ladylike qualities in a foreign land. ‘Women’s work for women’ and the educational ideal behind the civilizing mission were most clearly articulated in the various attempts to gain access to the zenana in colonial India. Here missionary strategy shifted, as the belief that women needed to be ‘rescued’ was replaced by the view that women were the key to changing the whole moral system of a society. If missionaries could enter the zenana—forbidden to European men—then Christianity and civilization would filter down to the peoples of India through their elite women, paralleling the role assigned to middle-class women by Victorian evangelical ideology. One result was the establishment of mission organizations solely for women, such as the Baptist Church’s Zenana Missionary Society (1867) and the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society (1880). Not only did their special work justify the recruitment of female missionaries, it also positioned them as crucial to the spread of the gospel and required them to be drawn from the middle classes of the British Empire.
The sign of success for female missionaries—and the imperial ideal— could thus be reduced to the extent to which they planted European ideals of gender behaviour. On the one hand, practices such as polygamy or widow- burning would be attacked by male administrators and female activists in both the colonies and Britain. On the other, women would introduce female education to secondary level. Heather Sharkey has demonstrated how the CMS mission in northern Sudan received continuing support from Britain despite achieving only one convert in sixty years as it was seen to have successfully established girls’ schools and improved the status of women.
Nevertheless, the path for white women’s employment in the mission Weld was not always smooth. In the late nineteenth century the emphasis on zenanas made it diYcult for many women to take up mainstream mission work with the Baptist Missionary Society. Scottish male missionaries in South Africa opposed the education of girls in mission schools beyond basic domestic training, thus obviating the need for female teachers as their own wives could undertake this duty. Similarly, the fund-raising efforts of British women were more often directed towards supporting all missions, not just activities of women. The New South Wales Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Association initially desired to raise money for female missionaries, but as they could not identify specifically feminine objectives, they had to divert their efforts to supporting all Presbyterian missions. Women seeking opportunities for careers in teaching or medicine that did not exist at home often met frustrating obstacles. Jane Waterston, the Scotswoman who became South Africa’s first female doctor, complained in the 1870s about being relegated to ‘women’s work’ despite having studied at Sophia Jex Blake’s London School of Medicine for Women for the specific purpose of practising medicine on the mission field. Just as single male missionaries posed a potential threat to the moral codes and domestic arrangements promoted by the churches, single females could provoke debate. This ranged from the perennial accusation that single women were likely to get married and cease the mission work they were originally employed to do, to the thornier problem of authority. While women could work with other women, what authority might they exercise over men? Marion Fairweather’s experience with the Canadian Presbyterians’ Central India Mission illustrates the problem. After she arrived at Indore in 1877, her involvement in a wide range of activities, including visiting and socializing with the local Hindu elite women, meant she was effectively doing work equal to any male lay missionary. However, she was recalled to Canada in 1879 and dismissed in 1880 after rumours that she had had an affair with the mission’s male founder. The fallout from this incident led to a preference for married males in this mission, not only because of the security in matters of morality this apparently offered, but also because Fairweather’s operational independence had unbalanced the precarious negotiation of authority between male and female missionaries in favour of the women.
A few exceptional women were able to take charge of their own missionary activities successfully by citing evangelical imperatives. ‘Missionary heroines’ such as Amy Carmichael in India and Florence Young in the Pacific founded entire organizations and institutions, travelled beyond the frontiers of colonial settlements, and negotiated with indigenous peoples independently of male administrators or missionaries. The most celebrated of these women (her image appears on a Scottish banknote) was Mary Mitchell Slessor, who went to Calabar with the Scottish Presbyterian Mission in East Nigeria in 1876. Unusual in her working-class background, she qualified by studying at night school while teaching in Dundee. Her work focused on building schools for African students and encouraging what would now be described as community development. She believed that Christianity would be received when people had acquired the educational skills and economic freedoms necessary to enable them to appreciate the Bible. She raised the eyebrows of male missionaries and colonial officials because of her close relations with indigenous peoples; the local Efik leaders encouraged her to carry her work beyond the colonial frontier. She maintained an unusual degree of autonomy through her ability to raise money in Britain independently of her mission organization. Simultaneously, she confronted the Efik over what she perceived to be abusive treatment of women, children, and slaves, urging the abolition of polygamy and establishing refuges for women and children who left their husbands and fathers. In 1883 she adopted the first of many Efik girls, and, despite being a single white woman, was by the 1890s known as Ma Akamba (Great Mother). Despite the claims of some missionary propaganda, Slessor’s achievements lay not so much in numbers of converts as in her communication of knowledge that helped the Efik respond more effectively to the impact of British colonialism.
Other single women might be less adventurous, but, as mission culture changed in the twentieth century, gained recognition by male colleagues. Female missionaries were finally able to develop an established professional identity which expanded beyond the private sphere after the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910 created guidelines for their selection and training. This was a profound change, as the work undertaken by male and female missionaries was now much less differentiated. In previous generations the cultural exchanges embodied in the missionary encounter had been far more focused on the communication of knowledge from men to men and women to women.
Brouwer’s study of three Canadian women working in different arenas of mission work demonstrates their increased recognition by male missionaries compared to their nineteenth-century predecessors, together with their new role in transmitting knowledge and culture from Western to non-Western societies. The new, professional missionary frequently held authority over indigenous men as well as other women, and, rather than communicating domestic practices alone, might pass on medical technology and skill or theological learning as part of a broader process of modernization. An increasing sense of professional identity empowered some women to determine for whom they would work, what they would do, and where they would do it. Miss Corbett, who worked in Darjeeling for the Scottish Presbyterian mission in the eastern Himalayas, was the only qualified teacher at the mission, and by 1908 had expanded her school to 300 students. She therefore asked for her work to be confined to the primary school, where she felt her expertise lay, exempting her from instructing at the mission’s teacher- training institute. When the Women’s Association for Mission denied her request, she joined another mission where her vocation could be fulfilled.
From the 1920s, as part of the new responsibilities formally accorded to women, some missionaries were now ordained as ministers in the Protestant churches or deaconesses in the Anglican Church. Depending on the beliefs and attitudes of their superiors, some were allowed to act as the sole minister in charge of new congregations, a role they could not usually take up at home. This was especially the case in southern China, Hong Kong, East Africa, and some remote rural areas of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Yet the authority of missionary women remained as contested as it had been in the nineteenth century, and in turn affected the role of women in the churches of Britain, North America, and the settler colonies, as female missionaries with wide experience in preaching and leadership were effectively demoted upon repatriation. Many Australian women who trained for the CMS at Deaconess House in Sydney were sent to places such as the Anglican missionary diocese of Central Tanganyika, where in the 1930s and 1940s the Australian bishop George Chambers used his authority to promote women’s work on the mission Weld. Yet when these women returned to Sydney, they could no longer preach or take up representative roles on decision-making bodies, leading to an anomalous gap between white women’s authority at home and abroad.
One of the less understood areas of research in missionary history is the work undertaken by Catholic female religious around the world. Like single women and missionary wives, nuns did not conform to established structures of domestic life, but at the same time they could not perform European household ideals of marriage, housewifery, and child-rearing. Unlike members of male orders, they had to overcome restrictions on movement outside their communities, which made mission work impossible until the nineteenth century, when new orders for women were instituted. Well into the twentieth century financial dependence and subordinate status constrained the work of missionary nuns.
The most challenging new research on women and missions has centred on the activities of indigenous women, both as subjects and as agents of mission, and their gradual emergence as leaders in the new churches. Three areas of research have arisen as the voices of Third and Fourth World women begin to be heard in the halls of academia. First are studies of exceptional women who converted to Christianity or used mission education to proceed to leadership positions in their own and in other societies. Secondly, attention is being to be paid to the crucial role of Christian women in expanding and leading new churches in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Finally, historians are beginning to write accounts of how indigenous women might respond to and resist the interventions of white missionary women, being variously compelled to live under foreign conditions, or adapting knowledges that were useful to them and rejecting those which were not. Within all these Welds, the outcomes of the missionary enterprise for indigenous women have varied with the nature of colonialism in each region and the dynamics of power between colonizers and colonized. Like much of the earlier work on women and missions, interest in the role of women of colour as agents of mission was first taken up in North America with study of African American women who travelled from the late nineteenth century to southern and western Africa to spread Christianity. In the British imperial context, early studies of indigenous women missionaries focused on India, where educational efforts combined with class dynamics to produce female leaders within Church and government. One of the most notable was Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922), a Brahman woman known as a scholar of Hinduism who famously converted to Christianity in 1883 while living at the female religious community at Wantage, in Berkshire. For the remainder of her life she promoted education for women and preached a distinctive version of Christianity in India as a way of enhancing the status of women in patriarchal societies of any kind. Like the maverick Mary Slessor, however, Ramabai has been singled out because she was exceptional, at times obscuring other stories.
As the explosive growth of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific is better studied, the role of women as grass-roots supporters and leaders is coming to be acknowledged, although much more work remains to be done on this topic. Enabling the numerical rise of Christians has been the work of Bible Women and the adaptation of organizations such as the Mother’s Union, now a backbone of the Anglican Church in Africa and a key social institution. Just as indigenous men began to emerge as leading clergy and bishops in the 1950s, so too women followed twenty years later. Some of the earliest Anglican female clergy in the world appeared in Africa when Bishop Festo Kivengere ordained four women as deacons in Uganda in 1972. During the 1980s in the Torres Strait Islands and northern Australia, senior indigenous women were appointed as church elders or ordained as clergy largely to work among other women.
Perhaps the most significant new histories of women and missions are those that focus on the diverse active responses made by indigenous women to the missionaries. In the Pacific, for example, missionary women’s attempts to impose European domestic behaviour met with mixed results. Mrs Gunn’s efforts to teach sewing and home-making to women in Vanuatu in the 1880s and 1890s were successful in terms of imparting skills, but her desire that they should produce artefacts that could be sold or otherwise used to support the mission work was wholeheartedly rejected. In Kenya missionary efforts at evangelization through schooling met some success in the early twentieth century as women and men perceived education as a means of social mobility, yet were reversed from 1929 when missionaries attacked female circumcision outright. Ninety per cent of Kikuyu adherents left the mission until a variety of compromises were reached including some communities in which new Christians themselves provided church circumcisers.
Recent works on this aspect of missions are necessarily based on painstaking oral history. Some make use of family connections to the subjects of mission education. Maina Chawla Singh’s account of American women in South Asia is informed by an awareness of how Indian and Bengali women were selectively adopting and adapting the knowledge taught by the missionaries to their own ends, an awareness derived from her own mother’s schooling in a mission-run college. Others use oral narratives to uncover otherwise unrecorded stories about the integration and adaptation of European Christianity to indigenous cultures. The work of Christine Choo has thus revealed the existence of a remarkable Aboriginal order of nuns, the Daughters of Our Lady, Queen of the Apostles, at Beagle Bay in Western Australia in the 1940s. This demonstrates the variety of outcomes for indigenous women who attempted to maintain a traditional identity while converting to Catholicism, who negotiated oppressive mission structures on the one hand, yet also had to cope with loss of lands, forced relocation, and the stringencies of hostile state legislation on the other.
Given the substantial body of work on women and gender concerns in missions, we might in conclusion reflect further on their relative lack of impact on mainstream narratives of mission histories. First, many of the women who have written these accounts have turned to the topic not because they are centrally engaged in religious or mission history generally, but because they are pursuing paths that women took per se. They did not therefore engage with the central concerns of the main practitioners for whom mission history was a priority. Many such scholars took different questions as their starting point, about women’s position in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modern history. They linked women missionaries to examinations of women and colonialism, and saw mission women as the bearers of ideas of modernity both in the careers they pursued and in the skills they attempted to transmit to the proleges they adopted. They themselves, while by no means consciously feminist, exemplified how ordinary middle-class women might adapt the opportunities that modernity presented to their own benefit, how the imposition of domestic ideals, the creation of institutions and organizational structures involving women, their education and medicine, their lessons in the authority of men reveal that Western activities in the East were not solely about white men conquering the world. The impact of modernity on colonialism, and on women as agents and subjects, has not been a major interest of mission historiography; hence this whole strand of missionary history remains marginal.
Work on women and gender in mission contexts still has the capacity to inspire continuing research and encourage other historians to consider ways towards greater inclusiveness. Meanwhile, indigenous scholars from the excolonies will themselves increasingly command their own voices in the Weld, through methodologies of their own choosing, and the historians of the West, female and male, will in turn learn more fully from them of the nature of the mission project and the understandings of new churches.