The conventional image of women missionaries in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras is of prim and proper ladies who attempted to disseminate highly conventional, not to say repressive, views of the role of women to non-western societies. Elizabeth Prevost's thoroughly researched study of Anglican women in Madagascar and Uganda supplies plentiful evidence that the reality was frequently at odds with this stereotype. The cultural encounters experienced by the women sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (in Madagascar) and by the Church Missionary Society (in Uganda) led to profound questioning of restricted Victorian paradigms of femininity and to the forging of transracial bonds of Christian women's identity that ultimately created an international network of Christian sisterhood which may even be denominated, Prevost argues, as ‘feminist’ in character. The strengthening bonds of fellowship between missionary and African women threatened male hierarchy, both in indigenous society and within the missionary societies. They also had the potential, increasingly realised in the inter-war period, to subvert western preconceptions of racial superiority, and hence effect a widening dissociation between missions and the objectives of British imperial control. Crucial in this respect was the role of the Mothers' Union in propagating an ideal of Christian motherhood that identified the Christian family as the source, not simply of moral instruction, but also of impulses of social transformation and religious reform that had an effect far beyond the home itself. In both Madagascar and Uganda, branches of the Mothers' Union spread with rapidity from their inception in 1901 and 1903 respectively and soon passed into the hands of African women leaders. Mothers' Union meetings expanded the scope of women's participation in church life, enabling them to expound the Scriptures, lead in prayer and exercise a quasi-ministerial role, with the notable exception of sacramental functions, which remained closed to them. Exposure to such evidence of female leadership capacity made women missionaries and their supporters into some of the earliest advocates of women's ordination. In the final section of the book, Prevost turns her attention to an organisation which, though not a missionary body, was supported by leading women internationalists such as Maude Royden: after the passing of the Representation of the People Act of 1918, the League of the Church Militant (formerly the Church League for Women's Suffrage) redirected the energies of Anglican suffragists towards the goal of securing the ordination of women in the Church of England. Although this goal would not, of course, be reached until 1994, Prevost's fine book adds to the accumulating weight of evidence that the impact of the missionary movement on British society may have been scarcely less significant than its role in fashioning religious and social transformation in the non-European world. Whilst it must be said that only a minority of women missionaries consciously espoused feminist ideals, the broadening overseas experience afforded by the missionary movement was undoubtedly one of the solvents subverting the legacy of Victorian notions of the proper sphere of women.