The Basel Mission emerged from the Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft, a society founded in the late eighteenth century in Basle which brought together various Pietist and revivalist groups in Switzerland and southern Germany. Instituted in 1815, the mission at first had no foreign fields itself, instead sending its early recruits to work for British organisations, principally the Church Missionary Society. In 1828 a small party of missionaries was sent directly to Accra on the Gold Coast of West Africa (present-day Ghana); six years later the mission also began independent operations in south India. The dialogue between these two branches of the evangelising endeavour is central to Ulrike Sill's study of the role of women and the ideology of Christian womanhood in the Basel Mission in nineteenth-century Ghana, as it was in British India that the idea of ‘women's mission’ (Frauenmission) was first developed before being transplanted to West Africa. By the early 1840s, as the Gold Coast enterprise was in the process of reinvigoration after high mortality rates had devastated the ranks of its pioneers, the mission was firmly committed to Frauenmission, which sought to propagate an ideal of Christian femininity shaped by the rigorous devotional sensibilities of Württemberg Pietism. Mining the rich documentary resources of the Basel Mission archive, Sill explores the dynamics of this project from the 1840s to the 1880s among the Ga and Akan peoples of the south-eastern Gold Coast. It was based on the assumption that native women were essentially ‘slaves’ of their husbands and male relatives, an oppression that would be ended not simply by Christian conversion and the adoption of European notions of bourgeois domesticity but by a reconfiguration of gender relations through female education. Yet a tension existed in the male-dominated and conservative Basel Mission between ideals of female domesticity on the one hand and vocational empowerment on the other. The main exemplars and agents of both were initially missionary wives, although something of a division of labour emerged as a number of unmarried women teachers rose to prominence. Indeed, it was as educationists that women missionaries made the greatest impact on local society. A number of long-serving female personnel came to exert considerable influence within the arena of girls' education: women like Rosina Widmann, Wilhelmine Maurer and the Euro-Africans Catherine Mulgrave and Regina Hesse. Mulgrave is an especially interesting character: one of a group of ex-slaves recruited from Moravian congregations in Jamaica to bolster the mission project, she opened girls' schools at a succession of stations and, following divorce from her first husband, married the mission's leading scholar of the Ga language, Johannes Zimmermann. Mulgrave's career exemplifies Sill's central argument: that previous scholarship on the role of woman in the Basel Mission has tended to be overly focused on European agency and on the unchallenged imposition of Pietist ideals of femininity and domesticity. Although still concerned more with missionaries than with their converts, this work goes some way towards complicating our understanding of a key field of Christian encounter in nineteenth-century Africa.