The modern missionary movement allowed European and American women opportunities to challenge the cultural expectations of their own societies whilst, for good or ill, introducing to other parts of the globe the forms of domestication, education and healthcare which they espoused. Often obscured in official missionary society archives, Protestant women in the nineteenth century were successful fundraisers, hard-working wives, ardent Bible readers, voluntary group organisers, committed teachers, nurses and (eventually) doctors. Scholars like Dana Robert have led the way in analysing the life and work of anglophone missionary women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this volume, Michele Sigg provides insight to women associated with the evangelical revival and, particularly, the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS). She shows how they were prominent actors in social change through a variety of associations and networks. These women have been doubly neglected in the historical assessments of the era as they were female members of a minority form of Christianity in France.
The PEMS was an ecumenical and evangelical society established in 1826. Its founding meeting provides the first descriptive vignette of Sigg's book and appears again in chapter 6. Chapters 1 and 2 chart the history of Protestant women's movements in France from the Huguenots, through the persecution of Protestants to the stirrings of Wesleyan-influenced revival at the end of the eighteenth century. This thorough background prepares the reader for the ways in which the transnational evangelical revival, which included women's education and a renewed focus of access to the Bible, was contextualised in France. Sigg explains the national projects for the care of poor women and children, knitting rooms, and the French Bible women organising reading groups in the provinces. She introduces us to women like Albertine de Broglie (1797–1838) and Emilie Mallet (1794–1856) whose positions in high Parisian society enabled them to galvanise funding for 2,500 infant schools across France and the overseas work of the PEMS. Chapters 8 and 9 examine the pedagogical work among the Basotho of women like Elizabeth Lyndall Rolland (1803–1901) and Sarah Dyke Casalis (1815–1854), who married PEMS missionaries and worked alongside Basotho converts in southern Africa. The final chapter circles back to the concern for renewal within evangelicalism by the mid-nineteenth century, and particularly the role of Caroline Malvesin (1806–1889) in the establishment of the deaconess movement, which was to have a long impact in France and through northern Europe.
Sigg demonstrates a thorough familiarity with French sources of the time, both published and unpublished. This alone makes Birthing Revival an excellent resource for the anglophone world. By using correspondence, memoirs and reports of women's societies she is able to reconstruct the lives of prominent women, often providing a short biography of their lives before focusing on their particular contribution to mission. This allows her to navigate official church and missionary society archives, which often obscure the role of women. Sigg understands the social norms of the time and explains how pioneering women used their evangelical faith and, in some cases, their social status, to navigate gendered constraints. The missionary cause at home and abroad allowed women to push the expectation of female nurture beyond the domestic sphere into schools, organised pastoral care and the management of voluntary societies. Women understood themselves to be better at fundraising, fellowship, friendship and ecumenical engagement than men. Many evangelical men agreed and promoted their activities. Outside evangelical circles, however, the activities of evangelical women were often viewed with suspicion. The women's own priority was not self-determination per se. Rather they were intent on following Christ and spreading the gospel that so inspired them. Thus, their independent agency was deliberately veiled at times when it was deemed to jeopardise the wider goal.
Sigg presents a positive and critical view of evangelical women engaged in mission in France by analysing the Christian motivations of female actors. She writes sympathetically of their achievements and the creation of a female missionary identity without hiding the contingencies with which women worked or the mistakes that they made. It would have been interesting to learn how this view might inform current feminist and postcolonial critiques of mission, but Sigg makes only limited reference to the way in which recent scholars have overlooked or criticised this movement for social change. For example, Fiona Leach's examination the class and racial assumptions of female missionaries from Britain to Sierra Leone would have provided a resource from which Sigg might have developed some counterarguments. This does not reduce the fine historical investigation that is presented in Birthing Revival. With erudition and sensitivity it fills an important gap in the history of mission, evangelicalism and women's studies.
