As Reid S. Trulson establishes in this well-written and thoroughly researched study, Charlotte Hazen White was the first woman to be appointed a missionary by an American mission board when she was approved for service in Burma by the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions in 1815.

Trulson is driven by the failure of both contemporaries and historians to recognize White as a figure deserving of the kind of attention lavished upon female missionary celebrities such as Ann Hasseltine Judson and Harriet Atwood Newall. Unlike these missionary wives, who are accorded the title of “missionaries” by posterity but were at the time given no formal missionary appointment, the widow Charlotte White was sent to Asia as an appointed missionary without any qualifier.

The famed Ann Judson and the many other American missionary wives of the early nineteenth century were granted the honorary rank of assistant missionary, but formally speaking were not considered full missionaries. Why does this distinction matter? As Trulson puts it in the preface, “For Charlotte and for other women, appointment meant calling things by their right names” (x). In other words, White was the first American woman to be given the title that was the rightful due of the many other women who served without formal appointment; but, nevertheless, the bestowal of that title on White was a significant step for American Protestant missions.

Over the course of the book, Trulson traces the life and missionary career of the titular character, starting with Charlotte Hazen Atlee's upbringing in southeastern Pennsylvania in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Trulson highlights her conversion (under the name Charlotte Hazen White) to Baptist views in 1806, following the death of her first husband and son, her embrace of a missionary calling in the early 1810s, her acceptance as a missionary by the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions, and her dispatch to Asia in 1815. Then, it follows her work in eastern India (under the name Charlotte Hazen Rowe) after her marriage to a British missionary and work in Digha, outside Patna, for the Baptist Missionary Society starting in 1816, then, following a period of missionary work as a widow twice over, her return to the United States in 1829, where she worked as a schoolteacher.

Although this life story forms the backbone of the book, Trulson's argument centers on the questions surrounding White's initial appointment in 1815, the decision of the (American) Baptist Board to discontinue support for her following her marriage, and the choice of the (British) Baptist Missionary Society to refuse to recognize her as a missionary in her own right following the loss of her missionary husband.

Given the common assumption among American Protestants in the early nineteenth century that missionaries had to be both male and ordained, the decision of Baptist Board leaders to appoint White as a full missionary is surprising, especially since White's appointment was followed quite quickly by a decision to not appoint any further unmarried women.

Before White could even depart for Burma, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Philadelphia, Henry Holcombe, was actively seeking to counteract White's appointment. Although the dispute did not enter the public eye, there was nonetheless a raging “hidden controversy” (50) that threatened to derail White's missionary career before it could even begin. Holcombe staged a dramatic resignation in protest of the appointment of a woman missionary alongside several allies, depriving the Board of a quorum before rescinding his resignation in order to vote at the subsequent meeting. Despite these high jinks, Holcombe failed to overcome the clear opinion of the Board that White's appointment was constitutional.

The responses of members of the Board who lived far from Philadelphia, which Trulson includes in this section, are particularly rich, offering a compelling glimpse at Baptist leaders’ understanding of gender and the missionary calling at the time. For example, Lucius Bolles of Massachusetts “cordially approve[d] of female Missionaries,” while Judge Matthias B. Talmadge of South Carolina made clear that “the constitution does not confine the board to one sex Only” and “the word Missionary does not mean a Preacher” (64). Others, such as Richard Furman of South Carolina and Lewis Richards of Maryland, seemingly approved of White's appointment but only in an auxiliary role alongside a married couple.

Despite this ultimate endorsement of White as a missionary, American Baptist leaders seem to have been all too happy to wash their hands of the controversy when White married a British Baptist missionary and settled, not in Burma but in north India. By doing so, at least in their minds (but not hers), Rowe put herself out of the bounds of the Baptist Board and instead under the jurisdiction of the British BMS, entering the now-familiar role of the missionary wife—a situation sundered by the death of Rowe's husband and the disinterest of the British society in offering a formal missionary appointment to a woman.

The analysis of the controversy over White's appointment, along with the richly detailed portrait of her missionary work in Digha, drawn from Baptist missionary archives in Britain and the United States, are the most compelling parts of the book, helping to contribute to a growing body of scholarship on American women missionaries. Like the seminal work in that field, Dana L. Robert's American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), Trulson is attentive to distinctions in the appointment of missionaries that are too often skimmed over by scholars who take for granted the “missionary” status of female missionaries.

The book might have succeeded more fully by cutting down on the sometimes ponderous details of family background and chronology as well as moderating the occasionally filiopietistic tone and instead focusing more intently on analyzing what it meant to be a “female missionary” (and, relatedly, a “missionary”) and why the Baptist Board, unlike the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and other contemporary societies, were willing to embrace (albeit temporarily) the formal appointment of a woman.