Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:30:56.692Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Married to the Mission Field: Gender, Christianity, and Professionalization in Britain and Colonial Africa, 1865–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Elizabeth Prevost
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , October 2008 , pp. 796 - 826
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For overviews of the Protestant and Anglican women's missionary movement, see Grimshaw, Patricia, “Faith, Missionary Life, and the Family,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Levine, Philippa (Oxford, 2004), 260–80Google Scholar; Murray, Jocelyn, “Anglican and Protestant Missionary Societies in Great Britain: Their Use of Women as Missionaries from the Late 18th to the Late 19th Century,” Exchange 21, no. 1 (April 1992): 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Role of Women in the Church Missionary Society, 1799–1917,” in The Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 1799–1999, ed. Kevin Ward and Brian Stanley (Grand Rapids, MI, 1999), 66–90; Sean Gill, Women and the Church of England: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London, 1994); Deborah Kirkwood, “Protestant Missionary Women: Wives and Spinsters”; and Peter Williams, “‘The Missing Link': The Recruitment of Women Missionaries in Some English Evangelical Missionary Societies in the Nineteenth Century,” in Women and Missions: Past and Present; Anthropological and Historical Perceptions, ed. Fiona Bowie, Deborah Kirkwood, and Shirley Ardener (Providence, RI, 1993), 23–69.

2 Midgley, Clare, “Can Women Be Missionaries? Envisioning Female Agency in the Early Nineteenth-Century British Empire,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 2 (April 2006): 335–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Midgley's argument complicates the prevailing understanding of “missionary” as an officially male designation until the later nineteenth century; see Williams, “Missing Link,” and Valentine Cunningham, “‘God and nature intended you for a missionary's wife’: Mary Hill, Jane Eyre, and Other Missionary Women in the 1840s,” in Bowie, Kirkwood, and Ardener, Women and Missions, 85–105.

3 On spinsterhood and the women's movement, see Vicinus, Martha, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (London, 1985)Google Scholar, and Jordan, Ellen, The Women's Movement and Women's Employment in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York, 1999)Google Scholar. On the gendering of professional and marital status, see Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1915 (Princeton, NJ, 1987).

4 Haggis, Jane, “‘A heart that has felt the love of God and longs for others to know it’: Conventions of Gender, Tensions of Self, and Constructions of Difference in Offering to Be a Lady Missionary,” Women's History Review 7, no. 2 (1998): 173CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Haggis is one of a small but growing group of scholars who are using religion as a central category of analysis for historicizing the relationship between British feminism and empire. See Semple, Rhonda, Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism, and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission (Woodbridge, 2003)Google Scholar; Francis-Dehqani, Gulnar, Religious Feminism in an Age of Empire: CMS Women Missionaries in Iran, 1869–1934 (Bristol, 2000)Google Scholar; Rowbotham, Judith, “‘Soldiers of Christ’? Images of Female Missionaries in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain: Issues of Heroism and Martyrdom,” Gender and History 12, no. 1 (April 2000): 82–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thorne, Susan, “Missionary-Imperial Feminism,” in Gendered Missions: Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice, ed. Huber, Mary Taylor and Lutkehaus, Nancy C. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1999), 39–65Google Scholar.

6 On missions and colonialism, see Etherington, Norman, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar; Cox, Jeffrey, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, CA, 2002)Google Scholar; Hall, Catherine, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2002)Google Scholar; Thorne, Susan, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA, 1999)Google Scholar; Porter, Andrew, Religion versus Empire: British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004)Google Scholar; Elbourne, Elizabeth, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal, 2002)Google Scholar. On gender and empire, see Burton, Antoinette, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994)Google Scholar; Levine, Philippa, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003)Google Scholar, and Gender and Empire; Claire Midgley, ed., Gender and Imperialism (Manchester, 1998); Woollacott, Angela, Gender and Empire (New York, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Procida, Mary, Married to Empire: Gender, Politics, and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947 (Manchester, 2002)Google Scholar; Strobel, Margaret and Chaudhuri, Nupur, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, IN, 1992)Google Scholar.

7 The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) was founded in 1701 to help establish Anglican churches for English settlers overseas; soon thereafter it launched programs to evangelize nonwhite peoples. The Ladies’ Association (LA) was formed in 1864, renamed the Women's Mission Association (WMA) in 1894 and the Committee for Women's Work after its amalgamation into the administration of the SPG in 1904. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) was founded in 1799, a manifestation of the eighteenth-century evangelical movement that also produced the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792 and the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1795. The CMS was reluctant to endorse women's mission work, blocking opportunities to employ women professionally in 1815, 1859, and 1863; however, it finally began sending women abroad in the 1870s and permitted the formation of a Women's Department in the 1890s, headed by Miss Gollack. See Murray, “Role of Women in the Church Missionary Society”; Williams, “Missing Link”; Gill, Women and the Church of England, 173–205; Brian Heeney, The Women's Movement in the Church of England, 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1988), 58–63.

8 On the “invisibility” of missionary wives within professional British missionary organizations, see Jane Haggis, “Professional Ladies and Working Wives: Female Missionaries in the London Missionary Society and Its South Travancore District, South India, in the Nineteenth Century” (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 1991); Gulnar Francis-Dehqani, “CMS Women Missionaries in Persia: Perceptions of Muslim Women and Islam, 1884–1934,” in Ward and Stanley, Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 91–119; Murray, “Anglican and Protestant Missionary Societies”; Deborah Kirkwood, “Wives of Missionaries Working with the Society,” in Three Centuries of Mission: The United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701–2000, ed. Daniel O’Connor (London, 2000), 314–29; Kirkwood, “Protestant Missionary Women.”

9 Jane Haggis's observation of the LMS that the call to women of ideal marrying age posed mission work as an appropriate professional alternative for middle-class women also held true for the Anglican societies (Haggis, “Heart that has felt the love of God,” 174–75). On the professionalization of female mission work, see Semple, Missionary Women; Murray, “Anglican and Protestant Missionary Societies”; Williams, “Missing Link”; Kirkwood, “Protestant Missionary Women.”

10 Although in practice, Protestant—especially Anglican—missionaries had greater intercourse and collaboration with Catholic missions than with Muslim institutions, propaganda would often pose Catholicism as an equal barrier to the advancement of Protestant Christianity. Emma Raymond Pitman argued for the institutionalization of women's work as a preventative measure against either Catholic or Muslim ascendancy: “A further argument for the necessity for such an agency, lies in the fact that Roman Catholicism largely employs the aid of women, even among the recently-converted adherents of Protestant churches, and sets them to neutralize the work done by European missionaries, by winning over the women and children. This course was recently adopted in Madagascar. The Catholic Sisters of Mercy caught hold of the mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of the Christian converts, and made such mischief. Their success was mainly due to the fact that the natives preferred to have female teachers for wives and daughters” (Pitman, Heroines of the Mission Field: Biographical Sketches of Female Missionaries Who Have Labored in Various Lands among the Heathen [London, 1880], 4; emphasis in original).

11 The “zenana” refers to spaces that were segregated by sex. On the representation of the zenana in metropolitan discourse, see Nair, Janaki, “Uncovering the Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in Englishwomen's Writings, 1813–1940,” Journal of Women's History 2, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 8–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burton, Antoinette, “Contesting the Zenana: The Mission to Make ‘Lady Doctors for India,’ 1874–1885,” Journal of British Studies 35, no. 3 (July 1996): 368–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rowbotham, Judith, “‘Hear an Indian Sister's Plea’: Reporting the Work of 19th-Century British Female Missionaries,” Women's Studies International Forum 21, no. 3 (May 1998): 247–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thorne, “Missionary-Imperial Feminism.”

12 See Davin, Anna, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop Journal 5, no. 1 (1978): 9–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Between 1873 and 1883, the CMS sent sixteen women overseas; by contrast, during the following ten years, 1884–93, it sent 192 women abroad, and by 1900 that number had grown to 388. By 1907 the CMS supported 450 women missionaries working worldwide. The WMA of the SPG supported about 100 women missionaries working worldwide in 1900; by 1915, the number had grown to 343, including fifty-eight non-Europeans. In 1892, the number of CMS women recruits began to outnumber men, and the 388 women sent abroad between 1891 and 1900 represented 51 percent of total recruits. More broadly, Jeffrey Cox has found that by 1900, women accounted for two-thirds of all British missionaries working worldwide; by 1931, women constituted 70 percent of the 622 Protestant foreign missionaries working in northwest India. See Murray, “Anglican and Protestant Missionary Societies,” 15–16; Williams, “Missing Link,” 55; Cox, Imperial Fault Lines, 152; Minutes of the Women's Committee of the Pan-Anglican Congress, 1907–1908, United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Archives (hereafter USPG), Committee on Women's Work Series (hereafter CWW) 11; M. D. Rice, “The Progress of SPG Women's Work in the Mission-Field, 1866–1915,” Mothers in Council, July 1915, 183.

14 Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Gleadle, Kathryn, British Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Heeney, Women's Movement in the Church of England, 5–18.

16 Spottiswoode, G. A., ed., The Official Report of the Missionary Conference of the Anglican Communion (London, 1894), 584–85, 599, 604, 665Google Scholar; Advisory Group on Conditions of Service for Women Workers Abroad Minute Book, 1907–1920, USPG, CWW 7.

17 Both deaconesses and nuns belonged to religious orders. In the Church of England, sisterhoods were revived in 1845, in the wake of the “high-church” Oxford Movement; the deaconess movement began in 1861, largely as an evangelical alternative to sisterhoods. Gill, Women and the Church of England, 146–72; see also Susan Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhoods in Victorian Britain (London, 1999).

18 Clare Midgley, “From Supporting Missions to Petitioning Parliament: British Women and the Evangelical Campaign against Sati in India, 1813–1830,” in Women in British Politics, 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat, ed. Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (New York, 2000), 74–92; Strobel and Chaudhuri, Western Women and Imperialism; Levine, Gender and Empire; Burton, Burdens of History; Walkowitz, Judith, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 On Christian philanthropy and the women's movement, see Levine, Philippa, Feminist Lives in Victorian England: Private Roles and Public Commitment (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar; Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society; Prochaska, F. K., Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar; Vicinus, Independent Women; Jordan, Women's Movement; Heeney, Women's Movement in the Church of England; Gill, Women and the Church of England.

20 The MU was founded in 1876 by Mary Sumner, the wife of a bishop, as a British women's voluntary association; it became active overseas beginning about 1900. For an overview of the institution, see Parker, Olive, For the Family's Sake: A History of the Mothers’ Union, 1876–1976 (London, 1976)Google Scholar.

21 Stella, “Fifty Years and Their Changes: #10, Philanthropy and Religion,” Mothers in Council, July 1906, 163–73.

22 Hill, Octavia, District Visiting (London, 1877)Google Scholar, and “Trained Workers for the Poor,” Nineteenth Century 33 (1893): 36–43; Ellen Ranyard, The Missing Link; or, Bible Women in the Homes of the London Poor (London, 1859).

23 Mrs. Drayton, “The Witness of Women,” address given at a women's meeting in Stockton in connection with the Church Congress, 3 October 1912, reprinted in Mothers in Council, January 1913.

24 Gill, Women and the Church of England, 77–80, 173–81.

25 Sex-segregated spaces were distinctive to certain classes and regions in India, and the majority of Asian and African women with whom missionaries came into contact did not actually live in institutionalized seclusion; nonetheless, the imagined space of the Indian zenana consistently worked to justify Western women's missionary interventions in metropolitan discourse.

26 Spottiswoode, Official Report of the Missionary Conference, 605.

27 Pitman, Heroines of the Mission Field, 4–5.

28 Ibid., 1–2, 8–9; emphasis in original.

29 See, e.g., Eleanor MacDougall, “The Ideal of Womanhood as a Factor in Missionary Work: The Influence of Christianity on the Position of Women,” International Review of Missions 1 (1912): 435–51.

30 Mrs. Bannister, “The Call of Women to Missionary Service,” in Spottiswoode, Official Report of the Missionary Conference, 580; emphasis in original.

31 Ibid.; emphasis in original.

32 Antoinette Burton has found the inverse to be true: that secular medical training programs for women (specifically, the London School of Medicine for Women) sought to discredit missionary medical practice as unscientific and nonprofessional and to de-emphasize religious conviction in favor of professional expertise in legitimizing a new brand of “medical missionary” (Burton, “Contesting the Zenana”).

33 Mrs. A. E. Ball, in Spottiswoode, Official Report of the Missionary Conference, 603.

34 For parallels outside the British context, see Prelinger, Catherine, Charity, Challenge, and Change: Religious Dimensions of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Women's Movement in Germany (New York, 1987)Google Scholar, and Brekus, Catherine, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998)Google Scholar.

35 Spottiswoode, Official Report of the Missionary Conference, 591. In contrast to this characterization, Cecillie Swaisland has argued that missionary societies had a difficult time competing for recruits with other more secular outlets of middle-class women's professionalism (Swaisland, “Wanted—Earnest, Self-Sacrificing Women for Service in South Africa: Nineteenth-Century Recruitment of Single Women to Protestant Missions,” in Bowie, Kirkwood, and Ardener, Women and Missions, 70–84).

36 Both the CMS and the MU had policies against missionary women working with “heathen” women, and the LA of the SPG only employed missionaries as schoolteachers.

37 The CMS was evangelical, emphasizing preaching, literacy, scripture, and the convert's personal relationship to Christ. The SPG was “high-church,” characterized by an emphasis on ritual and priesthood. The evangelical approach of deaconesses idealized the Word as the “light of Christ” that women evangelists would carry into individual homes, transforming the conditions of heathenism from within; by comparison, high-church sisterhoods deployed an ideology of protection and retreat, whereby the order would remove women and girls from the influences of heathenism and provide them safe haven (Vicinus, Independent Women, 46–84). Missionary societies, however, did not rigidly stratify differences of “high” or “low” churchmanship in employing women missionaries; the high-church SPG, for example, employed deaconesses as well as nuns.

38 In 1907, the Pan-Anglican Congress listed nineteen women doctors working abroad for the CMS, sixteen for the CEZMS, and eleven for the SPG. Most of these worked in India, and none were stationed in the African fields studied here. The number of trained nurses employed by the societies (for which comprehensive figures are not available) far exceeded those of doctors (Minutes of the Women's Committee of the Pan-Anglican Congress, 1907–1908, USPG, CWW 11). For a contrasting example in India of extensive mission institution building, see Cox, Imperial Fault Lines.

39 Feierman, Steven, “A Century of Ironies in East Africa,” in African History: From Earliest Times to Independence, ed. Philip D. Curtin, Steve Feierman, Leonard Thompson, and Jan Vansina (New York, 1995), 352–76Google Scholar; Pirouet, Louise, Black Evangelists: The Spread of Christianity in Uganda, 1891–1914 (London, 1978)Google Scholar; Larson, Pier M., “‘Capacities and Modes of Thinking’: Intellectual Engagements and Subaltern Hegemony in the Early History of Malagasy Christianity,” American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (June 1997): 969–1002CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 See Haggis, “Professional Ladies and Working Wives”; Francis-Dehqani, Religious Feminism in an Age of Empire; Kirkwood, “Protestant Missionary Women.”

41 Emily Lawrence left for Madagascar in 1867, but she spent an unexpected seven-year layover in Mauritius while waiting for conditions in Madagascar to be made suitable for a single woman's work. Some reports detail such “conditions” as the creation of a bishopric; others, the securing of other British female chaperonage to ensure a respectable working environment for an unmarried lady, after the unexpected departure of an SPG missionary couple whom Lawrence had been sent out to join in Tamatave. These two explanations may even be linked; that is, the need to create a respectable environment for Anglican women to work in Madagascar accelerated the creation of the new diocese and the appointment of a bishop in 1873–74. (Apparently the presence of other European mission communities did not serve the requisite function of mediating the problem of unmarried women since there were already agents of the LMS, Quakers, Norwegian Lutherans, and Catholic sisterhoods operating in Madagascar.) In the meantime, another SPG missionary was assigned to Tamatave, and his daughter Miss Percival began a school there. The appointment of Bishop Kestell-Cornish prompted Lawrence to renew her association with the LA, and she finally arrived in Madagascar in 1874. General Committee Analysis of Minute Books, 1866–1876, USPG, CWW 59, and Ladies’ Association Annual Reports, 1866–1894, USPG, CWW 329.

42 The CMS did not wish to shoulder responsibility for childbearing women's arduous journey inland and their isolation from medical help once there. The first female party traveled the 800 miles inland on foot in 1895, and a description of the challenges of the 1895 journey illustrated the concern attached to women's travel: apart from illness and bandits, the party contended with the “the waterless plain near the commencement of the journey, angry torrents, troublesome riverbeds and perilous bridges made with branches of trees, swamp and slush, dense, dark forest, deep ravine and cold mountain height” on their eleven-week traverse. By the following year, however, a major road connected the coast to the interior, steamers had arrived on Victoria Nyanza, and the railway was nearing completion (Sarah G. Stock, The Story of the Year: Being the CMS Short Popular Report [London, 1895–?], for the years 1895–96, 17–18; for the years 1896–97, 23).

43 Subsequent directors of women's evangelism attempted to emulate the Norwegian mission's model of boarding school to revive Anglican competitiveness in the educational marketplace. Bishop George King to WMA home secretary, 19 October 1899, Gertrude King to home secretary, 25 February 1901, and George King to home secretary, 5 August 1901, USPG, CWW 98. For a discussion of the two-fold Norwegian educational scheme of promoting domesticity and creating a Christian marriage pool, see Line Predelli, Nyhagen, “Sexual Control and the Remaking of Gender: The Attempt of Nineteenth-Century Protestant Norwegian Women to Export Western Domesticity to Madagascar,” Journal of Women's History 12, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 81–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 The LMS introduced Protestant Christianity in 1818 under the sanction of the successors of King Nampoina, who had centralized power in Imerina in 1806 by unifying the four ruling Merina kingdoms and establishing the capital in Antananarivo. Merina kings and queens attempted to institute Christianity to consolidate the religious authority necessary to claim political supremacy—by subjugating the ancient ritual objects (sampy) controlled by the nobles, appropriating literacy as a bureaucratic tool, and taking advantage of British military benefits. Religious state power vacillated over the next fifty years, and missionary activity ceased in the wake of persecution under Queen Ranavalona's regime. In 1869, Ranavalona II was baptized and declared Protestant Christianity the official religion, thus ending the half century of politicized struggles and safeguarding the interests of Anglican missionaries, who had begun work in Madagascar in 1864. Larson, “Capacities and Modes of Thinking”; Feierman, “Century of Ironies,” 372–74; R. S. M. O’Ferrall, Madagascar: A Hundred Years (Saffrom Walden, UK, 1964).

45 The colonial and ecclesiastical boundaries of “Uganda” basically overlapped. Under Lugard's treaty in 1892, which ended the civil war of succession and laid the groundwork for the Protectorate, various politico-ethnic groupings were reassigned both within and outside Buganda: kingdoms became “districts,” more generally grouped together as provinces (the western, northern, and eastern provinces surrounding the Buganda province). The Diocese and Protectorate of Uganda encompassed Buganda and the neighboring provinces. See Hansen, Holger Bernt, Mission, Church, and State in a Colonial Setting, 1890–1925 (London, 1984), xvi–xix, 48–51Google Scholar. Outside Buganda, the most important districts for women missionaries’ early work were Toro and Ankole to the west, Bunyoro to the north, and Busoga to the east.

46 Emma Kestell-Cornish to LA home secretary, 6 October 1878, USPG, CWW 192.

47 W. Hammond, Esq., to SPG, received 12 August 1880, USPG, CWW 193; emphasis in original.

48 H. H. Bell to Rev. John Roscoe, 1 July 1908, Church Mission Society Archives (hereafter CMS), Under-Africa Committee (G3), Uganda Mission (A7), Original Papers, 1908 (O6), 206.

49 In 1911, Chadwick wrote home to her friend Ethel McGowan that there were at least three women living alone in different stations or districts: Miss Attlee in Hoima, Miss Thompsett in Busoga, and Miss Bingham in Ndeje. 11 April 1911, CMS, Jane Elizabeth Chadwick Papers, Accessions 167/F3/23.

50 Hurditch journal letter, 20 April 1900, reprinted in Footsteps of Truth, July 1900, 253, CMS, G3 A7 Original Papers, 1898–1907 (O).

51 In fact, this was a moot point because Pike and Hurditch had already been working in Toro for five months when the Ladies Consultative Committee made its recommendation—a reflection of the practical disconnect between the channels of authority in Britain and in the mission field. Minutes of the Ladies Consultative Committee, CMS, G3 A7 O/1900/169.

52 Tucker to Baylis, 4 January 1901, CMS, G3 A7, Precis Book, 1898–1907 (P1). Pike and Hurditch had actually been placed in a similar position on their initial trek to Toro the previous year, when the Lloyds were compelled by fever to return to Mengo midjourney, leaving the two women to continue to Toro on their own with only one young Ganda man to escort them. Hurditch herself commented that “one would scarcely have chosen to go so far from everybody with only one other young girl,” but she embraced the opportunity to ameliorate isolation by entering into a closer relationship with God: “No longer was I one wee thing alone in a great, big, strange land, but I was the child of a King, who reigneth in Africa as well as in England. … Oh, it is worth coming to Africa to know ‘Immanuel’ [‘God with us’]” (Hurditch journal letter, 5 May 1900, reprinted in Footsteps of Truth, July 1900, 253–54, CMS, G3 A7 O/1900/132).

53 Ranavalona's government actively promoted education and eventually issued a law in 1882 requiring all Malagasy to send their children to the school of their choice, but it was a long time before this policy could take effect since in many places there were no schools at all, and the first French-Malagasy war (1883–84) set back efforts of expanding educational opportunities. The Anglican mission at Mahanoro was first constructed on the site where provincial Merina representatives had tried to establish a school three years prior, which was run for two years by a male LMS-trained Malagasy teacher and then abandoned. Lawrence to LA secretary, 26 March 1879, USPG, CWW 192; Emily Lawrence diary, 1884, USPG X Series (miscellaneous papers), 697.

54 Lawrence to LA secretary, 29 November 1883, 28 July 1884, and 24 November 1884, USPG, CWW 194; Lawrence to home secretary, 18 December 1888, USPG, CWW 196; Lawrence diary, 21 July and 9 August 1884, USPG X, 697; Lawrence, retrospective of ten years work in Mahanoro, included in report given to WMA while on furlough, 1893 Annual Report, USPG, CWW 329/30–31. Missionary ties with the royal family and prime minister linked them with Merina (“Hova”) hegemony in the eyes of eastern coastal ethnic groups (in the case of Mahanoro, the Betsimisaraka). Early programs of mission education on the coast, which relied on Hova assistants, tended to elicit and exacerbate anti-Hova sentiment. Amelia Stracham's slow progress with the boarding and day schools in Tamatave was due in part to this friction (Stracham to home secretary, 10 May 1878, USPG, CWW 192). Therefore, although several Betsimisaraka chiefs had requested teachers for Mahanoro, recognizing the social and political advantages of literacy under Merina rule, Lawrence found that appealing to the larger community required multiple channels of persuasion.

55 Lawrence to LA secretary, 21 May 1887, USPG, CWW 195; LA Annual Reports, USPG, 329.

56 “The Church in Madagascar, SPG Mission: Report of 15 Years Progress, 1874–1889” (unpublished pamphlet, 1889), USPG X, 695; Lawrence to LA secretary, 14 April 1892, USPG, CWW 197.

57 The women's committee of the Pan-Anglican Congress in London in 1907 debated whether women were more successful than men in starting new mission stations and concluded that ideally a joint effort was best. Minutes of the Women's Committee of the Pan-Anglican Congress, 1907–1908, USPG, CWW 11.

58 Chadwick to Baylis, 23 April 1901, CMS, G3 A7 O/1901/130.

59 Ibid.

60 When Chadwick applied for the housing grant, she expressed doubt that any of the men at the mission had time to take on the construction of new homes, leading her to suggest that the CMS give women the same training in carpentry and architectural design that it apparently gave male missionaries before leaving Britain. Chadwick to Baylis, 23 April 1901, CMS, G3 A7 O/130.

61 Cooper to LA home secretary, 6 November 1879, USPG, CWW 192.

62 Lawrence to LA home secretary, 31 May 1880, USPG, CWW 193. Surprisingly, Cooper reapplied for service in Madagascar late in 1882, but the LA declined her offer. The bishop's reaction upon hearing the LA's decision suggests that Cooper was unpopular with the other mission staff, due to both a lack of success at the school (although she claimed otherwise) and her penchant for pettiness: “She might possibly have done better as a teacher than she did before, but she is a person who did not rise superior to a good deal of very mischievous scandal and gossip when she was with us, and there is no one in the Mission who does not share with me in the relief which I felt when I heard that she was not coming out” (Bishop to home secretary, 2 November 1883, USPG, CWW 194).

63 Semple, Missionary Women, 199.

64 Woodford to LA home secretary, 31 December 1880, USPG, CWW 193.

65 Letters exchanged between Mary Simpson, Bishop Kestall-Cornish, and the LA secretary Miss Bullock, March–October 1890, USPG, CWW 196.

66 Buckle to LA home secretary, 11 July 1888, USPG, CWW 195.

67 Lawrence to LA home secretary, 15 April 1878, USPG, CWW 192.

68 Woodford to LA home secretary, 4 December 1878, USPG, CWW 192.

69 Bishop to LA home secretary, 6 November 1878, USPG, CWW 192; emphasis in original.

70 Bishop to LA home secretary, 15 April 1882, USPG, CWW 193. The secretary's reply to the bishop suggests that she concurred with his assessment of Woodford.

71 Woodford to LA home secretary, 30 April 1882, USPG, CWW 193.

72 Woodford to LA home secretary, Antananarivo, 16 June 1881, USPG, CWW 193.

73 For example, when deciding whether to accept Miss Isabel Barnes, an applicant for nursing work in Uganda who was engaged to another missionary but whose “poor exam results” at The Olives (a CMS training home) showed “weak” Bible knowledge, the CMS determined that while “under ordinary circumstances we should not consider her ready for acceptance as an independent missionary … as a fiancée I do not think we need be afraid to send her out as soon as possible” (Report from The Olives, 12 March 1907, CMS, G3 A7 O/1907/77). Barnes's fiancé, Rev. Owen, had requested leave to marry her the previous year, but the Parent Committee had denied the request because Owen had not yet served the full probationary period. Ironically, however, he was not permitted to take up his new post at Ankole until they married because there were other, unmarried ladies working there. Rev. Roscoe to secretary, 19 March 1906, CMS, G3 A7 P1/85; Owen to secretary, 11 April 1906, CMS, G3 A7 P1/115.

74 For example, Miss Agnes Buckle, working in Madagascar in the 1880s, repeatedly voiced her frustration with the unreasonable demands placed on her by the marriage of her coworker Miss Haviland, which doubled her teaching responsibilities in the Antananarivo mission school and later delayed her scheduled furlough. Buckle to LA secretary, 10 September 1885, USPG, CWW 194; Buckle to LA secretary, 11 July 1888, USPG, CWW 195.

75 Although neither the CMS nor the SPG adopted the policy of total celibacy practiced by the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (the most Anglo-Catholic of the Anglican societies), the CMS did prohibit the first generation of male missionaries in Uganda from bringing wives with them for health and logistical reasons. The infrastructural “opening” of the African interior and the creation of the Uganda Protectorate in the mid-1890s prompted the arrival of single women missionaries beginning in 1895 (see n. 42).

76 The CMS required its female missionaries to wait at least one year in the field, or until the first language examination had been passed, before marrying. CMS women who married could expect their salaries to be downgraded; however, there is some evidence that single women in the Uganda mission were paid (uncharacteristically) on equal terms as men. The WMA of the SPG required a pledge from its workers to remain unmarried for three years, and those who married prematurely would forfeit all financial support entirely. In the CEZMS, women who married before five years of service had elapsed were required to pay a proportional refund to the society. Regulations Regarding Marriage of CMS Missionaries Connected with the Uganda Mission, 3 August 1897, CMS, G3, East Africa Mission (A5), Precis Book, 1896–97 (P5); CMS secretary to Uganda missionaries, 28 January 1898, CMS, G3 A7 P1; Archdeacon Walker to secretary, 26 February 1907, CMS, G3 A7 O/86; Women's Committee of the Pan-Anglican Congress, 1907–1908, USPG, CWW 11; see also Kirkwood, “Wives of Missionaries Working with the Society,” 326.

77 In 1898–99, the brothers Dr. A. R. Cook and Dr. J. H. Cook were both permitted to marry their fiancées (nurses Katherine Timpson and Ethel Maddox, respectively) prematurely on the grounds that expeditious marriages would be more useful to staffing the medical mission. By contrast, Mr. H. E. Maddox's simultaneous request to marry fellow missionary Bertha Taylor before their probationary time had expired was denied (CMS, G3 A7 P1/199, 203, 204, 207).

78 CMS Memorandum on Marriage of Missionaries in Uganda, 3 August 1897, CMS, G3 A5 P5.

79 Tucker to CMS secretary, 18 January 1899, CMS, G3 A7 P1/62.

80 Circular letter from CMS secretary to Uganda missionaries, 28 January 1898, CMS, G3 A7 P1.

81 When Rev. Owen applied for leave to marry in 1906, the CMS required that he wait to take up his new post at Ankole until he married since there were single women already living there. Letter from Rev. Roscoe, 19 March 1906, CMS, G3 A7 O.

82 Pirouet, M. Louise, “Women Missionaries of the Church Missionary Society in Uganda, 1896–1920,” in Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era, 1880–1920, ed. Torben Christensen and William R. Hutchinson (Århus, 1982), 233–34Google Scholar.

83 Women's Committee of the Pan-Anglican Congress, 1907–1908, USPG, CWW 11; Pirouet, “Women Missionaries of the Church Missionary Society,” 233–34.

84 This was the same year in which the WMA of the SPG passed the rule prohibiting its workers to enter into a marriage contract before three years had elapsed, in order that they might “give themselves wholly and without distraction to the work to which they were sent out to fulfill,” even if “it is not true to say that women are lost to mission work if they marry other missionaries” (quoted in Kirkwood, “Wives of Missionaries Working with the Society,” 326).

85 Druitt to WMA secretary, March 1902, Original Letters Received, 1898–1902, USPG, CWW 98.

86 When Miss Louisa Barker announced her engagement to Mr. McMahon in the summer of 1882, she also made it clear that the marriage would not take place before her three-year term at the school had expired, which met with the bishop's approval: “They are exceedingly well suited to one another, and I supposed so long as Miss Barker performs her duties in her school she will not lose her position on account of her marriage” (Bishop Kestell-Cornish to LA secretary, 20 July 1882, USPG, CWW 193). Barker, however, found herself in a paradoxical position: although her professional status would be temporarily preserved intact by the delayed marriage, her ability to prioritize professional over spousal commitments would end after the marriage had taken place, at which point she would have to give up her work in the capital and move to an outstation: “Should his time be then entirely given up to country work, as is thought desirable, my work, I suppose, I shall find there too” (Barker to LA home secretary, 14 September 1882, USPG, CWW 193).

87 Bishop King to LA secretary, 23 March 1902, USPG, CWW 98/270.

88 Glass journal letter, 15 November 1902, CMS, G3 A7 O.

89 Wendy Urban-Mead has examined a similar case in mid- to late nineteenth-century Bechuanaland (Botswana). Bessie Price, the daughter of Robert and Mary Moffat, struggled to stay engaged with what she considered the “real” work of the mission, after she assumed the domestic duties of marrying a fellow missionary and raising twelve children. Unlike Glass, however, Price spent most of her life in the mission community and found continued opportunities of intercourse with Tswana women, which eventually contributed to her own eschewal of European “civilization” (Urban-Mead, “Dynastic Daughters: Three Royal Kwena Women and E. L. Price of the London Missionary Society, 1853–1881,” in Women in African Colonial Histories, ed. Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi [Bloomington, IN, 2002], 48–70).

90 Glass journal letter, 15 November 1902, CMS, G3 A7 O.

91 Mr. Fraser to CMS secretary, 24 October 1903 and 12 February 1904, CMS, G3 A7 O.

92 Ibid.

93 Deborah Kirkwood has demonstrated that “it would be inaccurate to make too sharp a distinction between marriage and vocation as alternative routes to missionary work” in this earlier context because marriage partnerships were considered an asset to the expansion of mission work in south central Africa (Kirkwood, “Protestant Missionary Women,” 25–31).

94 Porter, Religion versus Empire, 319.

95 World Missionary Conference, 1910: Reports of Commission (London, 1910), report 5, 149. In paraphrasing the testimonies by individual missionaries and their sponsoring societies, the conference reports usually omitted the names (and sex) of the original authors.

96 Cited in Kirkwood, “Protestant Missionary Women,” 34.

97 Weston, Mary, “The Status of the Woman Missionary,” Church League for Women's Suffrage Monthly Paper, January 1914, 4–5Google Scholar.