This richly detailed and ambitious study effectively intervenes in three overlapping fields of scholarship: the history of British women’s involvement in Protestant missions in the field, the history of indigenous women’s engagements with Christian missions, and studies of the impact of the foreign missionary movement on the imperial metropole. It greatly enhances our understandings of Anglican involvement in the missionary enterprise and the spread of Protestant Christianity in Africa, and it offers some interesting new insights into the complex relationship between missions and empire and the intersection with issues of gender and authority in the mission field. It also makes an important contribution to the literature on the emergence of Church feminism in Britain and reveals the religious dimensions of “imperial feminism.”

As Prevost notes in her introduction, “missionaries and their supporters inhabited a charged space between Christian constructions of universalism and colonial structures of difference” (5); it is the gendered dynamics of Christianization within this “charged space” that she sets out to explore in an impressive attempt to rethink the relationship between empire, Christianity, and feminism. The first part of the study focuses on case studies of the mission fields of Madagascar and Uganda between the 1860s and the 1920s; part 2 explores the impact of women’s engagement in mission on the Anglican church in the metropole between 1900 and 1930. The regions selected for the case studies are well chosen: they move beyond the well-researched area of Southern Africa; they afford two contrasting contexts in terms of the shifting relationship between indigenous elites and colonial power structures; and they provide examples of the two different strands of Anglican mission, the “high-church” approach of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), active in Madagascar, and the evangelical approach of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), active in Uganda. The ideology of female protection that informed the activities of women associated with the SPG in Madagascar is discussed in chapter 1 of the book and contrasted with the conversionist agenda of women of the CMS in Uganda, the focus of chapter 2.

The study effectively illustrates how missionary women’s activities and agendas were shaped in the field as an interactive process with indigenous peoples rather than simply involving the imposition of a preset metropolitan-defined agendas of conversion and civilization. Indigenous women emerge as agents of Christianization whose leadership was fostered and professionalized at this period, though the reliance on missionary archives means that the lives and words of individual British women activists such as Emily Lawrence and Gertrude M. King feature more prominently in the account than those of African women. As Prevost herself acknowledges, the perspective is mainly that of British Anglican women and the focus on exploring the impact on them of their dialogues with African women, with an emphasis on missionary perceptions and constructions of common ground. While this is perhaps inevitable, given the nature of the sources, it does highlight the practical difficulties of creating non-Eurocentric accounts of missions and processes of Christianization. It would have been useful if a fuller picture could had been given of the extent of both receptivity and resistance to conversion among women of different groups in the areas under study, so that interchanges reported by missionary women could have been interpreted within this broader context.

As well as exploring women missionaries’ involvement in the male-led organizations of the SPG and CMS, Prevost places two contrasting female-run Anglican organizations at the heart of her study: the conservative organization for married women, the Mother’s Union (MU), and the feminist League of the Church Militant (LCM). The MU, founded in 1876 to promote women’s maternal and familial roles as the foundation on church, nation, and empire, spread from its British base through the empire in the first decades of the twentieth century, with branches for both white settler and indigenous women, and became the largest global Anglican women’s organization. Its spread and popularity among African women in Madagascar and Uganda is discussed in chapters 3 and 4 of the book. The LCM, founded in 1909 as the Church League for Women’s Suffrage, was a smaller organization with a mainly British-based membership, but it drew on the imperial trusteeship and female missionary vocation to promote its agenda of women’s suffrage and ordination. In comparing the impact of the MU and the LCM in shaping Anglican agendas in relation to empire and the position of women (in pt. 2 of the book), Prevost reaches the conclusion that the feminist LCM, with its rights-based approach and metropolitan power base, was less able to break out of an ‘imperial feminist’ stance toward non-Western women than the MU. Prevost argues that the latter, while a socially conservative organization, created effective partnerships for change with indigenous women through stressing women’s common experiences as mothers and rooting female authority in maternal power. The existence of racially segregated organizations within the MU in Uganda and elsewhere should, however, caution us against exaggerating the organization’s commitment to egalitarianism; perhaps it was rather that it provided an umbrella organization within which large numbers of African women found the scope to organize independently of men.

Overall, this well-written and coherently structured book should prove an invaluable resource for scholars concerned with exploring the links between missions and empire, women and religion, and feminism and imperialism. It combines detailed empirical research with sophisticated analysis to make effective and original interventions into several key areas of current scholarly debate in the field of British studies.