Professionalizing the Call: British Missionary Discourse

The expansion of Anglican female mission workers in the late nineteenth century transformed the nature of British evangelism by challenging assumptions of mission work as a necessarily male endeavor.Footnote 7 Although the wives and kin of male missionaries had long been central players in missionary endeavors, professional agencies did not officially recognize or financially support their service.Footnote 8 Beginning in the 1860s, however, missionary societies such as the SPG and the CMS actively sought out single women as missionaries in their own right, responding to developments both at home and overseas. In Britain, the opening of higher education, the professionalization of many social services, and the widespread concern over “surplus” or “redundant” women coincided with a growing legitimization of lay ministry and professional work within Protestant churches and presented new opportunities for women across a wide social spectrum to become employed as missionaries.Footnote 9

Abroad, Protestant missionaries feared that the ongoing race with Islam and Catholicism threatened their special status as the world's evangelizing agents, compelling Protestant missionary societies to reevaluate their strategies.Footnote 10 Women were key players in addressing this latter concern, both as missionaries and converts: societies sent single women into the mission field because they believed European women alone could bring indigenous women into the Christian fold. Missionaries, social activists, and feminists argued that the institutionalized seclusion of women living in Hindu and Muslim societies prohibited any but Western women from gaining access to and emancipating them from the enslaved conditions of the zenana.Footnote 11 Moreover, beginning in the later nineteenth century, the perceived social crises of moral and racial degeneration, secularization, and economic downturn placed additional responsibility on women to heal the British national character and protect the virtue of the empire through a renewed emphasis on home and family as the foundation of the state.Footnote 12 The missionary movement therefore charged women with a number of objectives—often conflicting—to respond to shifting national, international, and ecclesiastical interests: securing converts, liberating non-Western women, establishing new Christian social and political orders, stabilizing and regenerating national life, and offering a professional outlet for women's education, skills, and networks. The high number of female responses to this call suggests that the mission field also held an appeal for certain women to combine Christian conviction and professional expertise in a capacity that they could not at home.Footnote 13

Yet the women's missionary movement also faced a growing debate within Britain over the proper role of women in society and, more specifically, within the Church of England over women's religious authority. The gendered ideology of middle-class evangelicalism was central to the social construction of separate spheres that prescribed marriage and family as the only valid expression of “true womanhood.”Footnote 14 Mainstream Protestant churches subscribed to this ideology and marginalized women's opportunities for formal religious leadership, even though women formed the base of nineteenth-century church membership and voluntary work.Footnote 15 The female missionary movement muddied this picture by underscoring women's active participation in public and professional life, evidenced in particular by the missionary organizations’ growing numbers of training institutes and by their increasing preference for women with a university education.Footnote 16 Moreover, the Anglican revival of women's religious orders of deaconesses and sisterhoods in the mid-nineteenth century, which helped staff domestic and foreign missions, blurred the lines of church hierarchy and eventually fueled the organized movement for women's ordination after the First World War.Footnote 17 Mission work thus provided a space for women's professional and religious legitimacy, which most medical, educational, and ecclesiastical establishments did not afford.

The women's missionary movement drew upon and contributed to two related brands of social justice and humanitarianism, both of which had strong proponents in the Anglican church. First, the evangelical strain of British feminism promoted the distinctive virtues of womanhood by seeking a comprehensive cultural transformation in gender relations, which in turn established middle-class women's special vocation to emancipate other women through social reform at home and humanitarian interventions abroad. Such interventions included lobbying against cultural practices such as sati (widow burning) in India, polygamy in various Islamic and indigenous societies, and state-regulated prostitution in Britain and British colonies.Footnote 18 Second, the rationale of domestic missions and philanthropic organizations explained the increasing mobility and public visibility of women as a necessary prerequisite for the enactment of larger social and charitable responsibilities.Footnote 19

The Mothers’ Union (MU), the Church of England's largest women's organization (which itself supported extensive mission work at home and overseas), embodied how progressive social thought and action could complicate an otherwise conservative approach to politics and gender relations.Footnote 20 A regular contributor to an MU journal, who wrote under the pen name of “Stella,” justified women's emancipation according to Christian principles rather than feminist or professional objectives, pointing to “the onslaught made on the dark places of our large areas, and the efforts now made to reach the masses of population which used to be practically untouched” as women's most significant contribution to British religious and public life in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Stella pointed to philanthropists like Octavia Hill, Anna Jameson, and Ellen Ranyard, who were instrumental in institutionalizing women's philanthropy according to evangelistic paradigms and in reformulating the criteria for proper women's work by linking religious with social imperatives of training “district visitors” and “biblewomen.”Footnote 22 An address at a regional Anglican Church Congress in Britain in 1912 invoked figures like Hill and Maria Montessori in urging Christian women “to gain and use influence in the life of the world.” The speaker contrasted an older evangelical tradition of religious revelation as “emotional and fervent verbal expression” with a modern religion, which “is called upon to reveal its reality in a very definite and practical matter.” Accordingly, women too were “called upon” to assume a public persona in order to enact this collective Christian transformation, despite its assault on the gender sensibilities of prior generations: “Women have to face the facts of life and its dangers as never before; they have to take their part in discussion and control of matters formerly left untouched; and, however repugnant to our traditions, it is right that this should be so, for otherwise we could not meet the needs of our time. … The fact that we are more in touch with the world makes it incumbent upon us to ask, ‘What is to be our witness as Christians, as Churchwomen, in the life and thought of the world today?’”Footnote 23 This address legitimized women's activism according to a larger evolution of religious expression from emotional sentiment to practical application. In recasting women's social and moral responsibility as a consecrated vocation, the speaker collapsed the binary between masculine rationality and action and feminine emotionalism and passivity.

The gendered ideology of evangelical Christianity with its emphasis on women's innate qualities of spirituality, self-sacrifice, and moral purity fueled and complicated the objectives of missionary societies and individuals.Footnote 24 Missionaries considered these aspects of Western womanhood to be just as crucial in gaining spiritual access to heathen women's hearts as was the bare fact of their sex in gaining institutional access to their secluded circumstances.Footnote 25 In turn, missionary publicists deployed this discourse in arguing for the feminization of professional skills and social services. Miss Fanny Patteson, vice president of the LA of the SPG, intimately linked the “material” and “spiritual” dimensions of women's social activism at the Missionary Conference of the Anglican Communion in 1894: “Surely the demand for sympathy points to a great need, and woman's gifts enable her to supply it more fully than men. Is not often, though unconsciously, the cry of the heathen woman a call for this sympathy, expressed in need of material as well as spiritual assistance? The need is indeed great of women to teach and tend the young, to nurse the sick, to comfort the afflicted, to show sympathy. None but women can do this for women.”Footnote 26 Paradoxically then, the same gendered attributes that had long justified British women's confinement to a separate, “private” sphere of home and family also equipped them with the necessary skills to liberate other women from non-Western forms of domestic confinement.

Ostensibly, the discourse of the zenana confined female missionary agency to a safely “private” sphere of work among heathen women. As Emma Raymond Pitman emphasized in promoting the educational, medical, and domestic importance of zenana work, “No one who engages in it steps out of her proper sphere in the slightest degree. … It would be unwomanly to stand idle in Christ's kingdom, to refuse to help our perishing sisters, but to obey the great command is most Christ-like.”Footnote 27 Pitman went on to emphasize, “These lady missionaries, together with their trained native helpers, penetrate where male missionaries would be rudely and resolutely denied admittance. … As the result of the sending forth of this class of laborers, many thousands of degraded, down-trodden, uncared-for heathen women have been brought into our Christian sisterhood, have been lifted out of the mire of heathen serfdom, and have recognized with grateful emotion the truth that they, even they, are ‘one in Christ Jesus’ with the good and blest of other lands.”Footnote 28 Other missionary publicists pointed to a long scriptural and apostolic tradition in which the ultimate manifestation of Christian womanhood did not consist of a life of secluded piety (in either a middle-class home or a religious order) but one of public action and independence.Footnote 29 By establishing the continuity of prevailing gender ideology and evangelical theology with new paradigms of women's work, the women's missionary movement effectively confronted both the sanctity of separate spheres and the naturalized image of female passivity.

Even more than other British voluntary associations and professional agencies, however, missionary organizations demanded that the religious capacity of evangelism should distinguish mission work from parallel developments for women in British professions and social services. This qualification reinforced the meaning of a missionary “vocation” as a divine calling to service, as opposed to the more secular connotation it was gaining as a professional standard of training. Mrs. Bannister, a representative of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society (CEZMS) and the Church Missionary Society Ladies’ Committee, outlined this distinction at the Missionary Conference of the Anglican Communion in 1894: “If a ‘Vocation,’ in the popular meaning of the term, signifies to us a sphere of work for which we find ourselves naturally, or otherwise, fitted, a missionary vocation is something far higher; for we believe it to be founded upon a divine basis, to imply a Divine call, and to require a Divine equipment.”Footnote 30 Bannister also established the continuity of women's work with an older model of apostleship, posing female evangelism as only the most recent manifestation of an ancient Christian tradition of public service: “True missionary work is not the outcome of philanthropic feeling; it is not primarily the result of sympathy with ignorance and suffering, though it includes these. It is not a ‘vocation’ in the sense of a profession open to any who may volunteer for service in its ranks. It is a Divinely instituted Calling, as much so today as it was in the early Christian Church, whose Apostles, or ‘sent ones,’ were the earliest missionaries. Our Lord and Master Himself founded and commissioned a missionary Church, composed of men and women who had forsaken all to follow him.”Footnote 31 Promoters of women's missionary service therefore deliberately distinguished the professional credibility accorded women by their evangelistic duties from that represented by more secular outlets of private philanthropy and public social services.Footnote 32 Mission organizations required women who went abroad to take strict precautions against viewing the professional aspects of their work in anything other than a religious light. As a CMS missionary in Karachi illustrated, “It is only such spiritual women who are needed in the mission field, be they literary, educational, or medical workers. Especially with regard to the latter an opinion has been gaining ground, even among Church people, that true Christian work can be done by women doctors who go out solely as healers of the body, not as missionaries with the primary purpose of bringing healing to the soul. There is no scope for such like mere philanthropy in the Church's missionary work among the heathen.”Footnote 33 Thus, while recruitment efforts wove together various ideals of education, practical experience, and personal character, mission societies placed the highest value for missionary success on deeper levels of spirituality and religiosity, demonstrated by diligent prayer and meditation, regular church attendance, a strong background in church doctrine and history, and—particularly for members of the evangelical CMS—adept knowledge and interpretation of scripture. The societies attempted to discern candidates’ spiritual inclination ahead of time as part of the selection process and to weed out those who had more worldly motives in offering their service.Footnote 34 The head of The Willows, a CMS training home, promoted a system of probation and preparation as a way of “withholding from the mission field restless souls, unsatisfactory workers, and failures,” thus counteracting a newly professional and secular climate that she feared was attracting those who were only in search of independence or social mobility: “Christian work has, to a certain extent, become a fashion, a profession even, entered into, alas! by some from love of activity, and by others as an improvement on the position they might naturally occupy. These altered conditions necessarily call for even more careful and diligent training than might have been needed in former days.”Footnote 35

Metropolitan missionary literature thus privileged spiritual strength over professional status. Yet the missionary movement could not completely elevate a spiritual “calling” at the expense of professionalism; instead, spiritual and professional ideals of vocation were reciprocal elements of women's missionary ideology. By simultaneously deploying and subverting social expectations of femininity, this spiritual discourse created a space for women's skilled labor and independent activity. Asserting the primacy of women's spiritual authority had implications for foreign missions as well as home recruitment because the explicitly religious aspects of mission work were traditionally reserved for men. Official policy dictated that women's role in evangelism was domestic, medical, and educational—women were responsible not for conversion itself but for the cultural institutions that would solidify conversions: the Christian home and the Christian school.Footnote 36 Yet for the women working in the mission field, it was impossible to separate the religious and professional aspects of evangelism.

Expanding the Gendered Boundaries of the Mission Field: Anglicans in Madagascar and Uganda

Anglican missionary institutions and supporters in Britain used many of the same discursive and material vehicles as did the larger Protestant missionary movement to professionalize women's evangelism in the last third of the nineteenth century. The discourse of the zenana, the connection with social action and moral reform, and the expansion of educational and training institutes all worked to legitimize a missionary vocation that navigated between social expectations of “true womanhood” and the increasingly professional standards of women's skilled, independent labor. Yet Anglicans also occupied a privileged place in the missionary movement, by virtue of their membership in an established church and the diversity of theology and devotional practice it encompassed. The various strains of “churchmanship” were reflected in the different Anglican missionary societies, as well as in the domestic and foreign organization of women's religious orders—another distinctive feature of Anglicanism.Footnote 37 Thus, while other Protestant denominations recruited women earlier and operated within less hierarchical structures, Anglican missions did offer women a wide spectrum of vocational and religious affinity.

Missions in Africa in general, and Madagascar and Uganda in particular, offer unique contexts for studying how institutions and individuals put this vocation to work. For one thing, women's evangelism in Africa was not formally circumscribed within a zenana or other sex-segregated space. Although the zenana legitimized white women's mission and medical work within acceptable boundaries of a gendered “sphere,” the Orientalist discourse that fueled the metropolitan missionary movement did not encapsulate African social relations. Moreover, the fact that the majority of British women recruits and resources were deployed to Asia meant that missions in Africa were not as extensively institutionalized along educational and medical lines.Footnote 38 Therefore, the gendered terms of women's spiritual and professional authority had to be reinvented.

More specifically, Anglican missions in Madagascar and Uganda present illustrative cases of the feminization of mission work because of the formative role of single women's professional, independent evangelism in establishing Protestant Christianity. In both Madagascar and Uganda, a close connection developed between the Anglican mission presence and late nineteenth-century African state building. Ruling elites in Madagascar in the 1860s and 1870s and Buganda in the 1880s and 1890s used Protestant Christianity to centralize and consolidate authority over competing political factions and, in turn, depended on catechists (indigenous teachers and clergy) and white missionaries to secure their ascendancy in rural districts.Footnote 39 This strategy prompted not only the formalization of Anglican governance and institutions but a corresponding shift in the gendered composition of Anglican missions. Women's mission work formed a central component in a collaborative missionary and indigenous project of evangelization—first through work with elite women in the capitals and then in rural districts among marginalized ethnic groups.

The arrival of single women in Madagascar in the 1870s and Uganda in the 1890s constituted the first professional Anglican (Protestant, in the case of Uganda) women's work in both places. In other areas of Christian evangelism like India, the Middle East, and southern Africa, which had a longer history of colonial and missionary families, the wives and daughters of male missionaries laid the groundwork for the professional careers of single women later in the nineteenth century.Footnote 40 However, in these parts of Africa, married women's mission work only took root after professional single women had formulated a discourse and a program of female evangelism. In Madagascar, while a few unpaid missionary wives and daughters accompanied the first Anglican missionaries in 1864, their tenure was brief, and the Anglican mission presence on the island was tenuous before the conversion of Ranavalona II in 1869. The arrival of Emily Lawrence, who was the first professional worker sent out by the SPG LA after it was formed in 1866, coincided with (and may have been enabled by) the formal creation of an Anglican bishopric in 1873.Footnote 41 Lawrence then began a program of girls’ education, assisted by other LA-employed women, which formed the basis of Anglican women's evangelization in Madagascar for the next twenty years. In Uganda, the first male missionaries of the CMS had been prohibited from taking wives with them. The CMS only deemed it suitable to send women in 1895, when the creation of the Uganda Protectorate—a collaborative effort of colonial, Anglican, and Ganda authority—and advances in transportation made it feasible for British women to travel to and live in the interior.Footnote 42 The five women (the Misses Furley, Chadwick, Thompsett, Pilgrim, and Browne) who traversed the 850 miles from the coast to Mengo over the course of five months in 1895, therefore, represented the first white Protestant female presence to work in that part of east Africa. These new evangelistic schemes were also an outgrowth of the initiative of individual bishops (Bishops Kestell-Cornish and King in Madagascar and Bishop Tucker in Uganda), who provided a relatively friendly ecclesiastic arena for women. In an ostensibly male Anglican church structure, these bishops sanctioned and encouraged female work and activity, especially in the context of women's independent mobility and management of peripheral mission stations.

The minimal institutional structure of the missions further encouraged a high degree of women's autonomy. The SPG and its women's component were small organizations, and they only supplied a handful of British workers to the Madagascar mission at a given time: about six women on average, spread among five mission centers. The loose institutional framework of the SPG afforded women—those who had the initiative as well as certain linguistic, professional, and financial resources—a large measure of independence and influence in the spread of Anglican mission Christianity. The Anglican presence was also a small proportion of the total mission community in Madagascar, which included the LMS, Norwegian Lutherans, Quakers, Catholic sisterhoods, and Jesuits.Footnote 43 Anglicans thus offered one choice among many Protestant institutions, but Anglicans also benefited from the official adoption of Protestant Christianity by the Merina state, before French colonization in the mid-1890s displaced the Protestant ascendancy.Footnote 44 In Uganda, the CMS was the only non-Catholic mission working during this period, and it enjoyed a privileged position as the exclusive representatives of Protestant Christianity.Footnote 45 As not only the largest Anglican but the largest British missionary society, the CMS could also rely on greater resources and staffing. Its mission in Uganda was much larger: by 1910 about forty women missionaries and the same number of men worked in roughly twenty-seven mission stations in Uganda, and these figures do not include stations run by African catechists. Yet British missionaries accounted for only a small number of evangelists against the backdrop of the rapid spread of indigenous Christianity. The fact that white women were such a minority meant that mission establishments depended heavily on their work with indigenous men and women and generally gave them the space to develop these networks outside the mission stations (and, thus, away from central mission authorities).

Therefore, although Anglican women went abroad as members of a conservative and hierarchical institution, mission work in these areas offered certain empowering opportunities for women outside the British Isles. In both Madagascar and Uganda, the formalization of the Anglican church in an ecclesiastical and political capacity sanctioned professional women's work and gave the first single women a wide latitude for shaping the tenor of female evangelism, particularly outside the central mission stations. Yet, as the next section shows, the mission field's suspension of British norms of respectability and social relations carried the potential to limit as well as to expand women's authority.

The Opportunities and Constraints of Missionary Spinsterhood

Like other Protestant denominations, individual Anglican missionary agencies promoted unmarried women as uniquely suited to the physical rigors and vocational demands of the mission field, arguing that spinsters were unhindered by familial responsibilities, stronger than women who had born or would bear children, and at greater liberty to develop specialized skill sets. Yet these ideological reformulations of gender, professionalism, and evangelism represented not only a necessary measure in recruiting women but also a necessary justification for the conditions of mission service itself. Indeed, for all of the missionary movement's emphasis on single womanhood as a suitable channel for middle-class women's employment, single women's life and work in the mission field posed a significant threat to conventional British constructions of femininity.

Individual women's initiative, societies’ standards, and the particular conditions of these areas of the African mission field combined to create a significant outlet for single women to exercise authority and independence. Yet this authority was not unlimited; while women working outside central mission stations had a fairly wide scope of agency, their position within the mission station was often circumscribed by gendered ecclesiastical hierarchies and constrictive communal settings. Therefore, although mission establishments in the field privileged the evangelistic over the feminine terms of a missionary vocation, they did not always accord women corresponding equality with male missionaries; women were left to their own devices to carve out a space in the mission hierarchy, establish professional and personal credibility with fellow mission workers, and plead their cases to metropolitan authorities in the event of disputes.

The professional, personal, and physical spaces of women's missionary vocation were highly permeable. The small staff and loose institutional framework of missions in Madagascar and Uganda set fewer rules of work and conduct than missionaries would have been accustomed to in Britain; moreover, specialized labor was not as highly valued as it was in Indian missions. The specific nature of mission work varied according to the station setting, but single women's duties in these parts of the African field typically included some combination of school teaching, dispensary care, women's meetings, Bible study, baptismal preparation, and home visitation, in addition to household and mission management and organizing and attending social functions. In Madagascar, the scarcity of women workers made a diversification of skills essential to successful evangelism, despite the fact that SPG women were officially employed in a purely educational capacity. In CMS fields like Uganda, the mission allocated women's division of labor along professional lines, so that different missionaries were responsible for carrying out medical, educational, and evangelistic work. Yet even among these comparatively larger and more specialized staffs, women missionaries found it impossible to subject their labor to strictly professional categorization. Since a relatively small number of British missionaries staffed these missions, women frequently operated outside the direct purview of male-dominated authority structures.

The material circumstances of women's lives were difficult for some sensibilities to accommodate, and reactions from both inside and outside the mission community reveal the degree to which women's mission work transgressed normative gender boundaries. Travel arrangements for the initial voyage out often provided women with their first indication of the changed standards of respectability to which they had subjected themselves upon leaving Britain. Usually the sponsoring society and mission worked to arrange suitable escorts for the extent of the voyage, but circumstances sometimes dictated otherwise. When Miss Woodford arrived at the coastal port of Tamatave in Madagascar in 1880, the mission was unable to find any married men to escort her on the journey inland, and the bishop's wife was obliged to meet her at the coast and accompany her to the capital alone.Footnote 46 Soon thereafter Mr. Hammond, a member of the SPG mission in Mauritius, who would occasionally host missionaries traveling to and from Madagascar, admonished the SPG and LA for their negligence in failing to provide safe and respectable passage for its ladies: “Mr. Hammond cannot let this opportunity pass without protesting most strongly against the great want of sympathy manifested by the SPG towards the lady missionaries sent out by that Society to do its Mission Work. Miss Woodford would have been allowed to leave England for Madagascar alone in a … vessel which was afterwards wrecked, but for the personal interest taken in her position by Bishop Copleston and other friends.”Footnote 47 Highlighting an egregious abandonment of decorum, he chastised the SPG for its failure to protect not only women's safety but their feminine integrity.

The evangelistic work of Anglican women also involved a fair amount of independent mobility away from the central mission compounds where they were stationed. “Itinerating” (short-term travel to rural outstations) was crucial to fostering the medical, instructional, and social networks on which British women relied to catechize African women, and it required frequent travel across vast terrain (by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or canoe, accompanied by porters to carry and set up bedding, tenting, and food). Sponsoring societies endorsed the practice, but the British colonial administration in Uganda perceived the unsupervised movement of large numbers of white women through rural expanses as a safety concern. After a roadside robbery in Busoga in 1907, District Commissioner H. Hesketh Bell criticized the CMS for its failure to provide guardianship for unmarried women who did not have the option of relying on husbands: “Considering the unprotected position in which your ladies often find themselves, and the freedom with which they move about among the natives, I am surprised, indeed, that catastrophes have not already occurred. … The spirit and pluck shown by your ladies is most admirable, but I hope you will agree with me in thinking it unwise to allow them to expose themselves to disasters only to be expected in the neighborhood of sensual and curious-minded negroes.”Footnote 48 Although Bell drew on a widely circulated trope of the danger posed to white women's virtue by native sexual aggression, the CMS must not have found it compelling. Mission authorities placed too much evangelistic value on women's itinerating to restrict these excursions.

Mission authorities faced a conflict of propriety versus practicality in these situations, charged as they were with protecting women's respectability, the mission's efficiency, and missionary relations with the colonial state. But when forced to choose between these objectives, the evangelistic needs of the mission usually won out. For example, CMS policy forbade single women to reside in or manage outstations on their own or with unmarried male missionaries, but that rule was often overlooked in Uganda due to short staffing.Footnote 49 Such was the case in Toro in 1900, when the sudden departure of a missionary couple, the Lloyds, left an important station in the hands of two single women, Misses Pike and Hurditch. When Mr. Lloyd had originally petitioned the bishop to allow him to take up his former post in Toro after his marriage and to overlook the fact that “it was not considered wise policy to allow a young married woman to go where no doctor is available,” the bishop had granted the request largely to enable the beginning of the two single women's work in Toro, “as there certainly were obvious difficulties in two young girls going so far off where only young men are working, and a few government officials are stationed.”Footnote 50 The Bishop's decision also went against the recommendation of the CMS Ladies Consultative Committee in London, which questioned the wisdom of sending two such young and inexperienced women where “there are European Government officials in the near neighborhood.”Footnote 51 When the Lloyds’ departure due to ill health the following year created a situation that was less than ideal, Bishop Tucker nonetheless felt that Pike and Hurditch's evangelistic importance rendered the moral dilemma of keeping them there worth the risk. There were 700 children under their supervision in the mission schools, and the bishop wrote the CMS home secretary that he “would rather that all the ladies should be withdrawn from Uganda than these two from Toro.”Footnote 52

Women's independent management of missions underscores how they were able to forge new spaces of authority. Emily Lawrence's work in Mahanoro, Madagascar, provides another salient illustration of this point. In the late 1870s, Miss Lawrence began formulating a plan to establish a mission on the eastern coast, in response to a request from several local chiefs for teachers.Footnote 53 The bishop and the LA approved the plan in 1883, and in June 1884, Lawrence traveled with a Malagasy priest from Antananarivo to Mahanoro in order to establish an Anglican mission. During the weeks that followed, Lawrence successfully launched the mission by engaging in a complex series of political and cultural negotiations with the Merina government's representative and the local Betsimisaraka community and by employing her medical expertise to foster receptivity to the mission.Footnote 54 The SPG did not appoint a priest in charge until November, which meant that Lawrence supervised the educational, medical, religious, and administrative workings of the mission throughout its inceptive stage and periodically thereafter when the resident priest was on leave or the mission was between priests. The Malagasy mission staff gradually grew under her purview, and in 1887 there were two schoolmasters/catechists and four live-in teachers at the girls’ school, along with her Creole assistant Lydia Tessier. The bishop put Lawrence in charge of overseeing “male” mission work as well as her own for up to nine months at a time, even though she delegated much of the responsibility to the Malagasy workers. Both the frequent absence of a priest in charge as well as the unmediated presence of unmarried priests indicated that the mission had begun to look the other way in matters of missionary propriety when the efficacy of the work was at stake.Footnote 55 Lawrence also lobbied for an Anglican hospital, and in 1889 she secured a grant from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge to begin a full medical mission. In 1892 (her last year in Mahanoro and her twenty-fifth year of mission work), she oversaw the building of the first mission hospital on Madagascar's eastern coast.Footnote 56

Single women's missionary activity was therefore highly independent in settings like Uganda and Madagascar, where women founded and managed many Anglican mission centers on their own.Footnote 57 Women's evangelism appropriated many of the functions traditionally reserved for their male counterparts, including almost every aspect of lay and religious leadership except the administration of sacraments. Therefore, unlike in Britain, where women were barred from preaching or becoming ordained, in the African mission field, their evangelism assumed an almost clerical capacity. Moreover, the professional fluidity of mission settings allowed women like Lawrence—who was officially employed as a teacher but also skilled in medicine—to develop networks with indigenous authorities and to diversify their evangelistic strategies in the service of religious conversion. Yet the defeminization of women's vocational functions, which created a space for female autonomy and authority outside the central stations, could also subject women to stringent constraints within mission communities.

The issue of housing pitted the realities of communal living against the ideal of protecting the virtue of single womanhood. While many women spoke of clean and comfortable living situations in mission stations, others were less than pleased with arrangements that compromised not only their health and comfort but the seemliness of communal relations. In 1901, Miss Chadwick asked the CMS overseas secretary to take up the issue of women's housing in Mengo and outlying stations with the CMS Parent Committee.Footnote 58 The shortage of housing meant that new women arrivals were forced to turn male missionaries out of their homes, which made the women “to feel that we were under a personal obligation to one or other of the gentlemen of the mission for the houses we have lived in. … It certainly is not pleasant for us.” Moreover, the existing housing was unsatisfactory, subjecting women to small, dark, unventilated conditions that were prone to flooding: “I do not honestly think that any gentleman in the mission would be content with the quarters that Miss Robinson and Miss Allen have cheerfully put up with during the last few months.” The two women working at the mission in Ngogwe were compelled to inhabit “a very much smaller house than that occupied by a single gentleman and so dark that Miss Tanner's eyesight has been considerably affected by it while it is depressing in the extreme, even to an occasional visitor.” Chadwick argued that the mission's abandonment of gender norms had actually resulted in unequal treatment of women. She was exasperated with the mission administration for neglecting to ameliorate unmarried missionaries’ quality of life and for failing to recognize how their living conditions affected their mission vocation: “I cannot but think that here, with all the wear and tear of climate and hard work, with somewhat uncongenial food and the well-known temptation to irritability and ‘nerves’ that Africa brings, that the lady missionaries should at least be sure of light and airy and sufficiently commodious dwelling-houses, and, at least where three have to live together, more than one common sitting-room, as it is exceedingly difficult, say, for a newcomer to study the language while another may be entertaining a number of native visitors.”Footnote 59

Chadwick's petition ultimately succeeded in obtaining a grant for a new building later that year.Footnote 60 However, her representation of single women's disadvantages reveals an underlying sense of women's vulnerability to male missionaries, the mission administration, and the natural elements. Miss Agnes Cooper, who worked in Madagascar from 1876 to 1880, asked the LA to relieve her of her appointment after she had served her term, citing not only the stress of running a large school without assistance but also the anxiety of living alone in an unfamiliar setting: “I certainly never expected when I came to Madagascar that I should have to live and sleep in a large school house entirely alone. I firmly believe that a very great deal of my ill health is attributable to the wakeful restless nights I always have, and must necessarily have owing to my position.”Footnote 61 Lawrence confirmed the toll that mission work had taken on Cooper when the two crossed paths the following year in Mauritius on Cooper's return trip: “I think you will find Miss Cooper much altered. She looks miserably thin and ill and does not seem happy.”Footnote 62

Single women's experience seems to have fluctuated between extreme isolation and a total lack of privacy, and while some resented having to live alone, others preferred their independence to sharing tight living quarters with others. Missionary homes did not constitute the private sanctuary removed from the professional world that middle-class ideology idealized in Britain. Instead, houses often doubled as outpatient clinics, schoolrooms, study space, and reception areas for entertaining African visitors; moreover, missionaries often commented that African customs of social intercourse were much more casual and spontaneous, which produced a high degree of unpredictability in provisions of hospitality. As Rhonda Semple has observed in the case of mission communities in Asia, mission work blurred the boundaries between personal and professional duties, private and collective existence.Footnote 63 For this reason, many women preferred a living situation that would allow them the greatest possible measure of privacy. Woodford complained of having to surrender both her personal and professional freedom when she moved to a different school in Antananarivo, changing from a situation in which she ran her own school and occupied her own house to one in which she shared both teaching and living arrangements: “I prefer solitude for many reasons. … Altogether I feel like a tree plucked up by the roots. However, for the sake of the Mission I suppose it is best.”Footnote 64

Clearly then, although missionary service implied an understanding that individuals should subsume their own wishes under those of the administration, many women experienced some inner conflict when they were expected to sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of the mission project. Such resentment could become acute when personalities clashed, as they were prone to do in small mission communities. Sometimes these clashes reflected the contested boundaries of professional and ecclesiastical authority. Mary Simpson's brief tenure in Madagascar is a case in point: in 1890 she sparred with the bishop over who had the ultimate authority to administer examinations in her Antananarivo school, with Simpson arguing that her “secular” capacity as a teacher and her employment by the autonomous LA (rather than by the SPG) insulated her from episcopal oversight. Simpson was dismissed before the end of the year.Footnote 65 In the central mission stations, there was little room for women to use professional status to contest ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Even more frequently, relations with other missionaries became strained when women felt unduly subjected to crippling standards of work and self-sacrifice for the good of the mission community and the evangelizing project. Scheduling furloughs (i.e., leaves to return to Britain) could elicit resentment on all sides since those who came up for furlough felt entitled to claim the right they were granted in their contract, while those left to carry on the work in the field disliked having to take on any extra work in their absence. When Agnes Buckle applied for furlough in 1889, the LA denied the request on the grounds that she had not yet served five full years in Madagascar (her arrival had been delayed by the war in 1884, which compelled her to commence work in Mauritius instead). The LA cited Emily Lawrence's willingness to wait five years before taking her first furlough, even though she had served in Mauritius for seven years prior to that. Buckle retorted that she had already done twice the work to which she had been assigned since the marriage of her coteacher Miss Haviland had left the work of two schoolmistresses in her hands. Moreover, she refused to follow Lawrence's example of self-sacrifice for the sake of her evangelistic vocation: “You write that Miss Lawrence remained about 10 years. Because she wished to stay I suppose! I do not. No call in the world would induce me to leave England for 10 years.”Footnote 66

Lawrence herself, however, acutely felt the effects of failing to take regular leave. Health was one of the worst causalities of the mission field, and Lawrence's first furlough took on greater urgency after a prolonged illness worsened throughout 1878. Although Lawrence was reluctant to leave until another recruit from England could take over, the doctor felt that she would run a great risk by staying in Madagascar. Lawrence described her condition as work inflicted: “I have no organic disease, I am suffering from severe nervous debility and loss of strength.”Footnote 67 Since Lawrence would have to break up the journey home by staying for a time on the coast, she suggested that she take over Amelia Stracham's work on the coast and that Stracham temporarily take over the school in the capital. Stracham, however, died suddenly not long after, which came as a shock for Miss Woodford, who had spent several months with Stracham after first arriving in Madagascar and had left only two weeks before her death (the exact cause of which is unknown). The suddenness of the event convinced Woodford that even the hardiest constitutions would falter under the expectations and demands of mission work:

The bishop often accused Woodford of hypochondria, and he expressed his doubts early on about whether she would be equal to the task: “I am sorry to observe that Miss Woodford takes every opportunity of impressing upon me how delicate she is, how much afraid of the sun, and how unequal to hard work. This does not look promising.”Footnote 69 When she finally gave in to poor health and left in 1882, the bishop expressed his resentment at her poor timing, coming on the heels of the recent arrival of a new woman missionary who would have to work alone in Antananarivo (particularly since his own wife had recently died). In requesting that the LA send out a replacement immediately, the bishop added: “Let me beg you not to send out a person who either is or fancies herself to be delicate. Miss Woodford's failure is from the latter cause.”Footnote 70 The bishop's rebuke of both Woodford and the LA made it clear that feminized traits of “delicacy” had no place in the mission field.

Woodford herself conveyed a different picture of her departure. While the bishop questioned both the validity of her health concerns and her dedication to the mission community, her own correspondence indicates that she deeply regretted having to abandon the mission. She had successfully built up both Anglican girls’ schools in the capital, and she was frustrated that she would not have the chance to witness the fruits of her labor. “It is very sad to have to leave my work now that all is going on so well. Ten of my dear girls were baptized on Easter Day (with the full consent of their relatives) so that now I have not one unbaptized girl or woman in my school. … I am so grieved to leave my dear people and scholars, many of whom are deeply attached to me as I to them.”Footnote 71 Her ultimate sense of satisfaction in her work was particularly significant in light of the despair she had frequently experienced along the way. Like many missionaries (particularly women, according to official mission reports), Woodford took the disappointments of mission work personally, and her perpetual encounters with “heathen” moral standards produced discouragement and depression. She was more candid than most, however, in admitting the potential of such encounters to weaken her own religious faith. Writing home in 1881, she conveyed the following plea: “In conclusion let me beg the earnest remembrance of myself and work in the prayers of our friends at home. The low standard of morality here, the sad things which one sees and hears daily, all tend to lower the tone of one's own spiritual life, and especially as one has not the bright English services and sermons of home, and so one trembles lest after having striven to show others the way to the Kingdom, oneself should be a ‘castaway.’”Footnote 72 Woodford was not alone in questioning the narrative of inevitable progress and glorious sacrifice that official mission literature scripted for the evangelizing project. Women's encounters with “heathenism” produced frequent disillusionment with the mission enterprise, but their self-definition within that enterprise was also shaped in relation to competing versions of professionalism and womanhood.

The collective ethos that projected the needs of the mission over and against individual concerns marginalized women's recourse to either a professional model of the independent missionary or an evangelical ideal of womanhood. The contested terms of a missionary vocation, which slid unevenly between deference and autonomy, self-sacrifice and self-reliance, lay at the heart of the tension of missionary marriage.

The Problem of Missionary Marriage

Evangelical discourse cast mission work as an equal fulfillment of woman's natural vocation because it channeled the same qualities of service, selflessness, spirituality, virtue, and compassion that characterized marriage, motherhood, and domesticity. In the mission field, however, many women discovered the impossibility of fitting mission work and marriage into the same vocational space. Many women did not remain spinsters after they left Britain, and the ramifications of their decision to marry revealed the ideological limits of a missionary vocation to encompass both a gendered and professionalized ideal. In actively policing women's marriages, mission institutions went beyond posing spinsterhood as an option and made it instead a nonnegotiable condition of mission service. If evangelism served the cause of spinsterhood in metropolitan discourse, spinsterhood was the unremitting tool of evangelism in the mission field.

The self-sacrifice demanded by missionary service was projected particularly keenly by institutional expectations of celibacy. Mission organizations in Britain did not hire married or engaged women at the deployment stage; in cases of wives or fiancées who applied to join male missionaries in the field, the CMS did review their applications but used less selective criteria as it did when reviewing “independent” candidates, assuming that married women would not be responsible for a high proportion of mission work.Footnote 73 Thus, even at the deployment stage, the CMS signaled a discrepancy in the standards of married and single women's evangelistic contribution and vocational integrity and in the gendering of the professional standards and financial support. This division was sustained in the course of mission employment. Official mission policy was designed to prevent marriage whenever possible since missionary marriages disrupted mission work by necessitating the untimely redistribution and replacement of labor.Footnote 74 Most Anglican societies imposed probationary terms that missionaries had to serve before marrying, and certain practical circumstances precluded marriage altogether.Footnote 75 For women, significant financial incentives were attached to these decisions since sponsoring societies would downgrade or curtail the salaries of those who married prematurely, require a proportional repayment, or both.Footnote 76 Men were not held to the same standard of celibacy. In theory they too were expected to forgo a traditional family life, and the CMS required its male missionaries to serve a longer tenure in the field before they could marry (four years, by contrast with the one for women); in practice, however, mission institutions did not expect that family life would interfere with their duties in the same way. In fact, in some cases missionary wives were seen as benefiting the particular work for which male missionaries were responsible, particularly in medical missions.Footnote 77 Accordingly, if men married in the field, they were still entitled to the full benefits of the society's financial and institutional support.

Therefore, marriage represented a personal comfort in which women missionaries were entitled to indulge only if it fit into the greater evangelistic scheme. As the CMS reminded its Uganda missionaries in 1897, “many devoted missionaries, men and women, of the CMS and other societies have deliberately denied themselves the privileges and blessings of married life in order that they may the more fully do Christ's work in the world.”Footnote 78 Bishop Tucker of Uganda asked the CMS to specifically recruit women who were not looking to get married and “who for the sake of the work would be content to live a single life.”Footnote 79 His assessment of efficient missionary service stipulated that the only way for women to remain faithful to their vocational calling and maintain professional credibility was to avoid marriage.

These priorities led to a number of regulations that governed the probationary period preceding marriage, particularly that furloughs not be taken prematurely in order to facilitate marriage and that discrete contact be maintained between engaged couples. Such initiatives were passed by the CMS in London in response to a series of engagements and marriages during the first several years of women's missionary presence in Uganda in the late 1890s, in an attempt to codify missionaries’ sexual boundaries and to uphold individuals’ responsibility to the mission over any personal or social commitments. The CMS could not reasonably condemn the idea of marriage itself; instead, the Parent Committee directed its critique at monitoring the “mutual intercourse of Missionaries before or after such mutual understanding.”Footnote 80 The rules were designed to ensure the respectability of mission living arrangements and to avert any rupture in the financial and logistical efficacy of the mission.Footnote 81 Those who applied for exemption from the regulations were successful only when their arrangement could be construed as benefiting the mission. Those who married without the permission of the CMS were dismissed, as in the case of a Miss K. Potter, who had only served half a year in Uganda when her marriage to another missionary in Kenya resulted in their discharge from the society.Footnote 82

These attempts to assert control over mission workers’ marital patterns did not succeed, however, in curtailing missionary marriages. In 1907, the CMS listed 133 women currently in the field worldwide who had married after beginning mission work; in Uganda, during the first decade after the first single women missionaries arrived in 1895, fourteen of the thirty-four women employed by the CMS married after beginning service for the society.Footnote 83 Yet those who acted within as well as outside officially sanctioned conditions of marriage had trouble reconciling their decision to marry with their role in mission work since marrying a fellow missionary constituted both a breach of contract and a betrayal of one's evangelical calling.

Married women in Madagascar who were initially employed by the LA of the SPG felt this dilemma acutely. These missionary wives usually kept a relationship with the LA and participated actively in mission life, but they forfeited full missionary status and the right to an independent salary when they married. They also found themselves having to justify their decision to sponsoring committees and local mission authorities, who resented the inconvenience of having to replace them and who worried about the break in continuity of the female mission staff. Barbara Druitt had only been in Madagascar nine months when she became engaged in March 1902 to Rev. H. H. Blair, the SPG priest in Mahanoro.Footnote 84 Her letter to the LA secretary announcing this development conveyed very mixed feelings, being happy about the engagement but also regretful of any trouble her resignation might cause the mission. She assured the LA that she would compensate their loss through volunteer work, simultaneously reassuring herself that marriage and missionary work were not mutually exclusive: “I look forward to helping after I am married, for I couldn’t think of being married if that meant ceasing to be a missionary.”Footnote 85 The bishop of Madagascar's response to the engagement revealed similar tensions, and he did not share Druitt's confidence that her marital position would allow her to sustain the full import of the work in a voluntary capacity. Although he could not outwardly decry the marriage of two capable missionaries—his predecessor had made it a point to encourage unions when they complied with mission policy—he nonetheless assumed her retreat from full missionary service as a foregone conclusion.Footnote 86 As he wrote, “I am exceedingly sorry that this engagement has taken place. … We lose an official worker who is exceptionally strong, and who would have filled splendidly any educational position in the Mission. I am afraid her future usefulness as missionary's wife does not compensate for all this loss.”Footnote 87 The bishop's distinction between a woman's function as a missionary versus a missionary wife reflected a widespread assumption that work and marriage constituted essentially irreconcilable paths, even in a mission setting where domestic, educational, and church-related affairs all coexisted in the same physical spaces. The organization of mission hierarchies around this principle resulted in the paradoxical dismissal of women's evangelical calling by ecclesiastical figures who prioritized the professional dimension of the work over the vocational one.

CMS women in Uganda who married in the field experienced a similar conflict of calling, particularly when children entered the picture. Beatrice Glass was a graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, who went to Uganda in 1900 full of zeal and optimism. She became close with the Ganda students and teachers in the Mengo school where she worked while studying for her language exams and wrote extensive letters home about the fulfillment she found in her work. She married fellow missionary Mr. Fraser in 1901 and stayed involved in mission work during the first year of her marriage, but the birth of a child in 1902 required her to withdraw from teaching in the mission schools and to shift her attention to informal modes of evangelism such as home visitation. Glass found it difficult to validate the new terms of her missionary contribution as legitimate evangelistic work. “I hope the chats I get with [our native friends] do really help as missionary work: they fall to my share, as my husband is out teaching 5 hours a day—but sometimes I feel so much time goes in[to] looking after our own large family and visitors and so little in[to] what at home and by most single missionaries here is considered real missionary work.”Footnote 88 In Glass's experience, marriage and motherhood did not measure highly on the yardsticks of vocational worth set out and maintained within metropolitan and mission networks.Footnote 89 Her sense of detachment from the mission mainstream intensified when her husband's new assignment required them to relocate from Mengo to a more remote mission station. Separated from her missionary coworkers and from her African friends, her only social intercourse in the new station came through her husband's pastoral networks and from the boys who worked as house servants. She was frustrated by her British friends’ failure to write, for they did not apparently sympathize with either the difficulty of her work or the spiritual connection she longed to maintain with them. The tone of her letters became increasingly discouraged throughout her three-year tenure in Uganda; as she grew isolated from the mission project, so too did she lose faith in the transformative power of the gospel in an African context.

Glass was not alone in expressing frustration with the “nominal” basis of Ganda Christianity. In Glass's changed circumstances, however, she felt powerless to combat this trend without any spiritual tools of her own. Moreover, there is evidence that her husband's church convictions were moving away from Anglicanism in favor of Presbyterianism, a possible reflection of the impotence both felt to enact change through the CMS.Footnote 91 Perhaps most revealing is Glass's plea for prayers to help them stay “filled with love” for both the Baganda and European communities, suggesting that discouragement (or perhaps a less progressive attitude on her husband's part) had taken its toll on the mutual respect she had initially felt for those she encountered in the mission field. Soon after she wrote this journal letter, her poor health and Fraser's studies compelled them to return to England in 1903. The optimism she displayed upon her arrival had transformed into despondency by the time of her departure, and her health prevented them from ever returning to missionary service.Footnote 92

These instances highlight how little room there was for marriage and motherhood within the discourse and practice of professional evangelism and how the uncompromising value that Anglican missionary societies and individuals placed on single womanhood produced a dilemma for women who were unable to reconcile married life with their role in the mission project. By virtue of their decision to marry fellow missionaries, these women were placed at odds with the professional and spiritual commitment of the mission. In this way, the paradigm of the celibate single missionary prompted a departure from earlier nineteenth-century models of women's mission work in Africa, which had projected marriage and vocation as two sides of the same evangelistic coin.Footnote 93 Moreover, the devaluation of married women's vocation inverted normative categories of femininity and “redundancy” circulated in the metropole: instead of upholding mission work as a respectable and even sacred alternative to marriage, the rules of the mission field dictated that marriage was an unacceptable alternative to evangelism.

Conclusion

These cases from Anglican missions in Africa show how the concern in metropolitan rhetoric to preserve the “womanhood” of women missionaries was not sustained by either the ideology or the practice of mission work in the field. This disjuncture had real consequences for missionary women, who inhabited a contested space where the terms and meanings of vocational authority were perpetually in flux. Marriage constituted a particularly charged issue for professional women's missionary enterprises, pitting normative ideologies of gender and evangelicalism against the vocational and practical imperatives of the work. The mission field was therefore both liberating and bewildering for women missionaries, who had to reinvent or violate inherited rules of social relations in order to assert their independence and remain faithful to an evangelical conception of vocation.

Andrew Porter has recently suggested that “the circumstances of missionary life led to debate about the role of women and inevitable departures from many of the rigidities of socially or functionally separate spheres.”Footnote 94 Indeed, the cases above highlight how women's mission work interrogated metropolitan standards of gender by challenging the boundaries of religious authority and social respectability. At the same time, such “circumstances of missionary life” could also reinforce naturalized understandings of femininity in metropolitan discourse. Missionary reports maintained that women's predisposition to weakness, sensitivity, and spirituality, while an asset in reaching out to their heathen sisters, also made women more susceptible to the hardships of the mission field. In 1910, the ecumenical World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh represented a wide spectrum of Protestant missionary sentiment with this gendered characterization:

In fact, as this article has highlighted, the challenges to women's health and well-being just as often took the form of overwork, isolation, and mission infighting, and the above passage indicates a number of difficult circumstances arising from housing, work, and mobility that were presumably beyond individuals’ control. Yet the report also ascribed the higher instances of failure among women to their physical deficiency, emotional fragility, and pettiness in communal living. Such reified assumptions died hard: fourteen years later, an SPG missionary replicated the 1910 report word for word in a memorandum to the Committee for Women's Work on the conditions of women's life in the mission field.Footnote 96

Hence, the mission field could reconstitute naturalized forms of femininity as well as collapse them. This discourse was not without its critics: the Church League for Women's Suffrage, an Anglican feminist society that included missionaries among its leadership and membership, argued that the gendered hierarchies of the mission field were a detriment to the spread of Christianity, premised as it was on the essential equality of humankind. In 1914 Dr. Mary Weston, a missionary in India, drew attention to the uneven pay scale of men and women missionaries and to the inequitable policy of marriage that increased men's salaries while eliminating women’s. Weston observed that missionary women's financial instability undermined their ability to ameliorate “a life of nervous strain, monotony, and often great loneliness” through leisure and consumer activity, and she postulated that naturalized gender attributes were rooted in women's financial disadvantage: “May not this be, in the case of missionaries, an explanation of the commonly accepted opinion that women do not stand the Tropics as well as men? Yet it is never taken into account, the generalizers preferring easily to assume that this is another of woman's ‘natural disabilities’ about which we hear so much.”Footnote 97

This critique, although advancing a particular agenda, captured the ambiguous function of spinsterhood and marriage in delineating mission work as Christian vocation, professional employment, and womanly fulfillment. More broadly, these two reports, which grappled with the relationship between evangelism and womanhood, illustrate how the individual cases discussed here were part of a larger discourse and experience of mission work. Professionalized standards of medical, educational, linguistic, and religious expertise, along with missionary societies’ expectation of an exclusive vocational commitment, effectively privileged an unmarried ideal of womanhood and helped designate an independent outlet for women's energies outside the home and outside of Britain. Yet the demands of the mission field also placed constraints on both single and married women's authority, and neither married nor unmarried modes of mission work completely reconciled the competing paradigms of professionalization, femininity, and spiritual vocation. Like the larger women's movement, the feminization of mission work simultaneously contested and reinscribed a world of “separate spheres.”