Emily Manktelow's Missionary Families: Race, Gender and Generation on the Spiritual Frontier is a new addition to Manchester University Press's Studies in Imperialism series. In an effort to expand the boundaries of Christian mission history, Missionary Families explores the impact of the London Missionary Society's decision to include missionary families in its global and spiritual enterprise. At the same time, it offers an informative and engaging “intimate history” (2) of missionary families in an attempt to analyze the lives of some of the tens of thousands of husbands, wives, and children who worked for British evangelical missionary societies around the globe. It was in the nineteenth century, Manktelow concludes, that the missionary family became the “primary agent of mission activity and during which debates about its role, rights, and responsibilities were thrashed out and defined” (15). By an examination of what she terms the “spiritual frontier”—the “edge of the Christian and ‘civilized world’” (16)—Manktelow argues convincingly for the necessity of family history in mission history and historical practice that recognizes the important place of the personal, emotional, and intimate. Indeed, Missionary Families provides strong evidence that missionary history is incomplete without an understanding of the complex way in “marriage, female agency and missionary domesticity” (24) shaped the nineteenth-century mission movement.

The book's six main chapters (there are eight in all), including the introduction, chart the shift from the London Missionary Society's use of unmarried men to the “ascendancy of the missionary family” (15) and the importance of the normative Christian household to the “civilizing mission.” By starting her study prior to the rise of the missionary wife and continuing to the employment of single female missionaries in 1875, Manktelow is able to analyze the complex and profound manner in which the decision to send out families influenced missionary enterprise and policy and, also, how policy was shaped at different times by London Missionary Society officials, missionaries and their families, and an active missionary public. Missionary Families takes as its focus the London Missionary Society's South Seas mission (the “proving ground” for its family policy); the South Africa mission; its official directorate and hierarchy in London; and such familiar subjects as the Moffats, Livingstones, and Prices.

In chapter 1, the introduction, Manktelow delves into the pertinent historiography (such as imperial, women's, mission, masculinity), and her clear analysis of previous work and its relation to her own is a real strength of the text—valuable for those new to the field—which continues throughout the book. Work on the missionary family, as she points out, is exceedingly slim, yet she references important work by Jeffrey Cox, Catherine Hall, and Rhonda Semple; and she surveys related scholarship on the missionary wife, missionary sexuality, and biography. She finds the lack of focus on family in mission history “surprising,” noting such things as the tradition of “familial rhetoric” (Christians as brothers and sisters, or missionaries as mothers and fathers), the manner in which “respectable domesticity” marked middle-class status, and “Ideologically, [how] family (and domesticity) was crucial to the idea of Christian modernity” (12–13). Interestingly, her project started as one on missionary women, but she found that ignoring their family context made the study “methodologically unworkable” (8).

In chapter 2, “The Rise and Fall of the Missionary Wife,” Manktelow traces the London Missionary Society's shift in policy—from sending as missionaries primarily unmarried, un-ordained male artisans to sending married, ordained men with their wives (common by the 1820s)—a story that is intricately and skillfully interwoven with changing understandings of race, gender, sexuality, missionary masculinity and femininity, family, respectability, and the “civilizing mission.” This chapter, as Manktelow states, “provides the chronological, conceptual and discursive framework” for the rest of the book and, significantly, offers an examination of the changing characteristics of missionaries, their wives, and the missionary enterprise—a very “open concept” at the end of the nineteenth century (24). Overall, it provides an explanation for the shifts in missionary policy from “integration” (Manktelow's term) of missionaries through interracial marriage, to “civilization,” or the adoption of Western culture by converts, and then to the eventual creation of mission institutions, “institutionalisation” (24). The stories of such men as John Cock and John Jefferson in the Pacific provide vivid evidence of the failure of integration as indigenous women refused to convert and the London Missionary Society denied missionaries religiously mixed marriages. Integration fared better in the presence of South Africa's indigenous Christian community yet ultimately failed as missionaries themselves rejected intermarriage and the imperatives of the “civilizing mission” took hold.

Manktelow turns her attention next to missionary marriage and the members of missionary families (chapters 3–6), analyzing such issues as the London Missionary Society's ultimate investment in the education and repatriation of missionary children (“the most powerful recurring motif of the missionary experience” [124]), parental anxieties over their “third culture kids” (164), children's “deviant” behaviors (such as the Henry children's sexual misconduct), and the way in which families became the “building blocks of evangelical mission” (129). Marriage itself became central to the missionary enterprise, leading to “a whole new mission theology based on domesticity” (89)—one in which such women as Mary Moffat were able to find vocation within evangelical home life. Importantly, the book also chronicles the way in which the use of missionary families inevitably forced changes in the London Missionary Society's practices and led to such things as the foundation of a charitable fund for widows and children and two London schools for mission children so as to segregate them from the cultures into which they were born and therefore avoid “racial contamination” (163).

Manktelow concludes Missionary Families with a brief discussion of second-generation missionaries and of the multiple avenues for future research, thus emphasizing the many unexplored areas her work opens up. On the whole, the book is a testament to the strength of Manktelow's methodological approach, her storytelling abilities, and her gift for bringing biographical details to life. This expertly researched and well-written book forces us to rethink the importance of family and marriage to missionary history and will be valuable to scholars of many disciplines.