2 - ‘She is a lady of much ability and intelligence’: the selection and training of candidates

Summary

‘She is a lady of much ability and intelligence, and likely to succeed well in learning the vernacular, and promises to become a good missionary provided she is under the influence of wise and devoted and spiritually minded colleagues’.

The theme that runs through this study is the importance of the individual to the mission encounter. While this study seeks to generalise, the very process of doing so highlights the importance of the specific. Nationality, gender, and religion are useful categories to be applied to the missions that developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. However, the chapters that follow indicate the important part that individual character and belief played in the development of a specific mission district or station. A complex interplay existed among these individuals both created by and acting in reply to the many constituents of British society at the time. Each candidate not only negotiated a role in the family, the church, the mission, but also with individuals in the mission organisation and with colleagues in the field. These complexities have been overlooked by researchers, weakening both their analyses and their generalisations.

Gender is the one category of analysis that permeates every level of this examination. Men attended a few specific training institutions and thus meaningful analysis can be done of how many candidates attended where and learned what. Women, by contrast, attended a myriad of learning institutions that taught more or less academic subjects on almost any level. Because the professionalization of occupations deemed feminine lagged behind masculine disciplines, even within a profession it was, and still is, difficult to assess the level of training. This meant that criteria other than academic excellence had to be used to assess female candidates. Rather than being simply a hindrance, these very complications suggest new ways of understanding the complex interactions among society, the mission, and both male and female candidates. This chapter presents a brief overview of the administrative structure of the LMS, the Foreign Mission Committee (FMC) of the Scots Presbyterians, and the CIM. It discusses how each developed a recruitment strategy for women based on the evolving needs of the mission.