The Foreign Missionary Movement and the Institutionalization of “Separate Spheres”

A key feature of the Protestant evangelical revival of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain was the formation of foreign missionary societies that aimed to spread the word of God among the “heathen” overseas, with a particular emphasis on regions under British imperial control.Footnote ⁹ Local ladies’ associations attached to these societies were among the most numerous and active of the female voluntary organizations that burgeoned in that period, and their work was recognized as crucial in promoting home support and raising funds for the work of missionaries overseas.Footnote ¹⁰ Women, however, were excluded from the national committees of these foreign missionary societies until the late nineteenth century or even later, and it was not until the period between 1858 and 1887 that the societies began to recruit women as missionaries in their own right.Footnote ¹¹

The reasons why foreign missionary societies did not initially recruit women were rooted in women's position within evangelical Protestant denominations during the early nineteenth century. The work of missionaries was understood to be “the preaching of the Gospel, the translation and publication of the Holy Scriptures, and the establishment of Schools.”Footnote ¹² It was acceptable for women to undertake the second and third of these key activities. Women, however, were excluded, or were in the process of being excluded, from preaching by all the mainstream British Protestant sects—Anglican, Baptist, Congregationalist, and Wesleyan Methodist—at the time that they set up their foreign missionary societies. Public preaching by women became confined to the Society of Friends and to splinter groups, such as the Primitive Methodists, neither of which were heavily involved in foreign missionary work, and female preaching did not reemerge into the mainstream until the 1860s.Footnote ¹³ Theological objections to female preaching combined with professional constraints on female training. While denominational patterns varied, most missionaries were recruited from the all-male ranks of the clergy and ministry. They increasingly received formal training of at least a year's duration; this at a time when women were totally excluded from higher education and professional training.Footnote ¹⁴ These factors, when combined with evangelicals’ strong promotion of “separate spheres” ideology, with its emphasis on the primacy of women's domestic duties, acted as powerful inhibitors to the employment of women as full missionaries.

The exclusion of women from missionary work in their own right thus seems at first sight to have been clear-cut: only men could gain the formal qualifications of a full missionary; only men could become the salaried employees of foreign missionary societies; and only men could perform that primary component of a missionary's role, preaching. From an early date, however, missionary societies recognized the benefits of recruiting married men as missionaries, and thus, as early as there were foreign missionaries, there were missionaries’ wives. Wives were seen as providing an important domestic base for their husbands and as modeling proper feminine domesticity to indigenous women.Footnote ¹⁵ Increasingly, however, they were also recognized as playing an important role in the development of girls’ education. Given that teaching was a crucial component of the male missionary's work, and indeed often found to be more effective than preaching in bringing the word of God to the “heathen,” the role of male missionary and missionary's wife in practice overlapped considerably. Missionary couples, rather than the missionary men, became the building blocks of the missionary enterprise, with as many women as men active in the early mission field.

Nonetheless, missionaries’ wives with domestic duties had limited time for evangelization. Some foreign missionary societies, therefore, also discussed the possibility of employing single women specifically to develop Christian educational work among girls on a more expansive scale. In areas such as India, where wealthy and high-status families practiced female seclusion and sexual segregation, male missionaries depended on Christian women to bring the Gospel to girls and women. However, while one or two women were sent out in this capacity, it was generally considered inappropriate to employ women directly.Footnote ¹⁶ The preferred solution was to work in cooperation with separate female-led societies for “native female education.” These organizations had their origins in 1821, when Baptist missionary William Ward gained the agreement of the ladies’ committee of the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) to raise funds to send out to the first single British woman to Calcutta as a Christian educator of “heathen” girls.Footnote ¹⁷ The committee followed this by selecting, training, and sending out a number of other single women to India and elsewhere, undertaking this project of colonial education alongside its work among working-class girls within Britain.

In 1834 the BFSS committee handed over the main responsibility for recruiting single women from Britain for “native female education” to the independent, female-run Society for Promoting Female Education in China, India, and the East (FES). Formed at a time of renewed popular enthusiasm in Britain for the foreign missionary enterprise, the FES was an interdenominational organization like the BFSS.Footnote ¹⁸ The Reverend Baptist Wriothesley Noel, “one of the most influential evangelical clergymen of early Victorian England,” was instrumental in its formation.Footnote ¹⁹ The society developed a network of auxiliary societies around England, and by 1847, the year Jane Eyre was published, it had sent out fifty single women “agents” to the foreign field.Footnote ²⁰ While its agents worked in a wide range of geographical locations, the FES focused particular attention on India, where it worked in cooperation with colonial female school societies set up by missionaries’ wives. Its work was complemented by that of the Edinburgh-based Scottish Ladies’ Association for the Advancement of Female Education in India, formed in 1837 under the supervision of a group of ministers of the Church of Scotland. Following the Disruption of 1843, many of the members of this society split away to form a very active new group aligned with the Free Church.Footnote ²¹

“Christian Psychobiography” and the Early Female Missionary Memoir

Christian educational work by women, while receiving very limited coverage in the publications of the major missionary societies, was not invisible to the evangelical public in Britain. It was regularly reported in the interdenominational Missionary Register, a widely circulated periodical: the Church Missionary Society, for example, purchased thousands of copies a month for free distribution among its subscribers and collectors.Footnote ²² The work of the FES was also highlighted by the publication in 1839 of Priscilla Chapman's Hindoo Female Education and by a history of the society published in 1847, the same year as Jane Eyre.Footnote ²³ In Scotland a journal entitled The Eastern Female's Friend was launched in 1844, aimed at increasing support for the work of the Female Society of the Free Church of Scotland for Promoting Christian Education of Females in India.Footnote ²⁴

In addition to such reports of missionary women's organizational and practical activities, there emerged a genre of female missionary memoirs. This set of early nineteenth-century texts has hitherto been largely neglected by scholars. The memoirs, as we will see, call into question Cunningham's assertion that “missionary” remained a “male noun” until the later nineteenth century. When set alongside these memoirs, Charlotte Brontë's presentation in Jane Eyre of “Christian psychobiography” in exclusively masculine terms can be seen more as a conscious choice than as a reflection of the limits of the broader cultural imagining of female missionary agency at the period. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë showed her awareness of both married and single women's involvement in female education in India, presenting these as the respective roles in the missionary enterprise envisioned by Rivers for Jane and by Jane for herself.

Early female missionary memoirs, while not as widely read as accounts of the leading male missionaries of the period, were frequently published in a number of editions of several thousand copies each. Linda H. Peterson, in what appears to be the only previous discussion of the genre, includes them under the rubric of women's autobiography and develops an insightful contrast between such “heroic missionary memoirs” and the “domesticated spiritual autobiography” of Jane Eyre.Footnote ²⁵ However, it is important to note that, although female missionary memoirs commonly drew extensively on the subjects’ own letters and journals, they were posthumous publications. The missionary husbands of the deceased women generally compiled and edited the individual memoirs. The memoirs were often framed by a substantial introduction by the bereaved husband or by another male supporter of missions explaining the reasons for publication and suggesting how the memoir should be read as an example to other women, encouraging them to take up the missionary cause. As such, the texts are multilayered, telling us as much about how male missionaries wished to present their wives to the British public as about the views, motivations, activities, and self-presentation of missionary women themselves.

The earliest memoirs of missionary women to be published in Britain were not those of British women but of an American missionary's wife and of a woman of Dutch extraction living in Cape Colony. The memoir of Mrs. Harriet Newell was published in a British edition in 1815. This nineteen-year-old, who had died soon after accompanying her American missionary husband to India, was celebrated as “the first Martyr to the missionary cause, from the American world,” signaling that from an early date the designation of heroic missionary martyr was not exclusively reserved for men.Footnote ²⁶

The 1824 memoir of Mrs. Matilda Smith, born in the Cape of Good Hope in 1749, celebrated a much longer term and practically important female contribution to the missionary cause. Its author and compiler was John Philip, the Scottish superintendent of the London Missionary Society's recently established mission in Southern Africa. Philip noted in his preface that, while many volumes of female biography had recently been published, in most of these “we see more of the contemplative than of the active character.” In contrast, Mrs. Smith “was for many years the chief instrument of preserving any degree of vital religion in the colony, and the grand animating principle of a missionary spirit, and of all the missionary exertions, made by the professed Christian population with which she was surrounded.”Footnote ²⁷ Here, potential missionary wives were presented with the role model of a widow who not only undertook missionary work independent of her two successive husbands, but also played the leading role in the promotion of missionary work in southern Africa—a powerful example of independent female agency rather than subordinate wifely assistance.

Keen to maximize her role as an example to British women, Philip's presentation of Smith probably deliberately obscured her ethnicity and racial background and her stance on slavery. Elizabeth Elbourne has found that Matilda Smith's real name was Machtelt Smit; although Philip referred to her Dutch extraction, he did not mention that she had one grandmother who was a freed African slave and that she herself owned a slave. Thus, as in most missionary propaganda, the complexities of the relationships between missionaries and colonialism, and between colonizer and colonized, are smoothed over, and the missionary agency of colonized women themselves is rendered invisible.Footnote ²⁸

Three further memoirs of American missionary women were published in Britain at an early date. The memoir of Harriet Newell's friend Mrs. Ann H. Judson, who helped establish the pioneering American Baptist mission in Burma, was published in a British edition in 1829, at the instigation of the Baptist Missionary Society, and was so popular in Britain that its ninth edition appeared by 1838. Judson, described as the first American female “to bear the gospel to the heathen in foreign climes,” had visited Britain in 1822, and the interest evinced by her tales of the Burma mission led her to publish an account of the mission for British audiences.Footnote ²⁹ In 1838, memoirs also appeared of Mrs. H. W. Winslow of the Ceylon mission and Louisa A. Lowrie of the Northern India Mission of an American Presbyterian organization, the Western Foreign Missionary Society. Winslow's memoir included an introductory essay by James Harrington Evans, a supporter of the Baptist Missionary Society. In this essay he stated that the memoir showed “how high and holy may be that station” that missionary wives might occupy as “fellow laborers in the missionary work,” undertaking work that “though apparently less responsible” than their husbands', “may be equally important.”Footnote ³⁰ Lowrie's memoir, published in London at the instigation of Congregationalist minister Andrew Reed, included a prefatory letter by a prominent British Baptist missionary in Calcutta, the Reverend W. H. Pearce. Stressing the importance of supporting the establishment of schools for girls, its author expressed the hope that his account of Lowrie's “brief but interesting course as a female missionary,” together with the other early American women's memoirs of Newell, Judson, and Winslow, would act as examples to British women both of the “mental and spiritual qualifications which render fit for missionary labour” and of how such labor was best conducted.Footnote ³¹ Such exhortations indicate that female participation in the Protestant Christian missionary enterprise was seen not only in British imperial terms but also as part of a broader transatlantic Western endeavor.

Pearce's 1838 description of Lowrie as a “female missionary” was not the first use of missionary as a “female noun” in a British publication. The term was also used in what is probably the earliest missionary memoir of a British-born woman: the memoir of Elizabeth Harvard, written by her husband W. M. Harvard, one of the first Wesleyan Methodist missionaries in Ceylon. Originally published in 1825, this had run into a third edition by 1833. Her husband's presentation of Elizabeth's life focuses less on her wifely role than on her role as a “female missionary” who “had the honour to be the first female who put her hand to the plough” of the Ceylon Mission. Harvard also ascribes to his wife many of the qualities of character that were seen to mark out heroic missionary men in both memoir and fiction. He comments on Elizabeth's “noble and adventurous spirit” and records the “zeal and firmness” with which she overcame her father's opposition to her decision to become a missionary's wife. He vividly conveys how this strength of character could lead to actions that challenged conventional gender roles: when her father tried to avoid giving his daughter away, she took him by the arm in the chapel and she led him to the altar!Footnote ³²

After the Harvards arrived in Colombo in 1814, Elizabeth coped with four pregnancies, the loss of two children in infancy, and bouts of illness and depression, but nonetheless she accompanied her husband on his missionary excursions around the island, superintended the female departments of Sunday and day schools catering to over 160 pupils, and learned Singhalese. The memoir stresses that she forged links with her “missionary sisters,” giving a picture of a missionary network bound together not only through family ties but also through friendships among women. Her husband also quotes Elizabeth's letters and diary to show “the admirable blendings of a public and private spirit in her character,” her combination of missionary ardor with sensitivity to domestic relationships. Harvard records that, after the couple returned to England, they traveled around the country promoting support for missions. Indicating that this work involved more than male public lectures and sermons, he states that his wife acted “in the true spirit of a Missionary agent,” giving talks to women about the girls’ schools of the Ceylon Mission and exciting their interest by exhibiting a collection of “native” needlework.Footnote ³³

The sense that female missionary work was a public role rather than simply a private wifely duty is also strongly conveyed in the 1829 memoir of Margaret Clough, wife of another early Wesleyan Methodist missionary in Ceylon. Her husband comments in the text that it was rare for such a young woman to “attain the same height in public life … as she did as the wife of a missionary,” while extracts from his wife's diary express her alarm at “entering into such a public sphere of life.” The introduction to the text, by a male family friend, stresses the importance when selecting candidates for foreign missionary work of checking not only their own qualifications but also whether their wives were qualified to be real helpmates. This highlights the way in which missionary societies were beginning to formally recognize the role of missionary wives as crucial to the success of their husbands.Footnote ³⁴

The Reverend William Ellis, in his 1835 memoir of his first wife Mary, echoed Harvard's 1825 memoir of his wife in presenting Mary as a “female missionary” and in stressing her close collaboration with her “sister missionaries”—although, significantly, he reserved the title of “Missionary” with a capital M for male employees of the London Missionary Society (LMS) like himself, signaling the upholding of gender differentiation on the basis of professional status. William presented Mary as an active promoter of domestic values among the indigenous women of Tahiti. This role was, as Anna Johnston has discussed, particularly crucial in the context of the LMS Polynesian mission, where outward signs, such as bonnet wearing by women, were read as crucial evidence of the veracity of islanders’ claims of conversion.Footnote ³⁵ As secretary of the LMS, Ellis was a highly influential figure who, in producing this memoir, gave important endorsement to the concept of public recognition of the lives and work of missionary wives, stressing evidence of the salutary influence of the biographies of other missionary wives in promoting “the interests of missions abroad.”Footnote ³⁶

Ellis refers specifically to the two early memoirs of American missionary wives discussed above, those of Harriet Newell and Anna Judson. The impact of these early American memoirs in encouraging British women to take up missionary work is further evidenced in the Reverend T. Middleditch's 1839 memoir of his daughter Mary Ann Hutchins, wife of a Baptist missionary at Savanna-la-Mar in Jamaica. Middleditch recorded his daughter “reading, or rather re-reading Harriet Newell and Mrs. Judson” as she decided to become a missionary. Writing to ask her father's permission to marry, she simultaneously confessed her devotion to missionary work and signaled her determination to become a missionary wife: “My dear Parents, duty calls, and great as is the sacrifice, your child must go.” She stressed that she acted not “from attachment to an earthly object” but from “desire to promote the glory of that Saviour who died for me.” While acknowledging at the end of her letter that she would of course obey her father if he could not give his consent to her plan, she seems less like the self-effacing female of much evangelical prescriptive literature and more like the stern male missionary Rivers, who puts religious duty before love in his marriage proposal to Jane Eyre. Despite his initial reluctance to allow her to become a missionary wife, her bereaved father later showed his pride in his determined daughter through compiling her memoir, which, in another example of the use of missionary as a “female noun,” he entitled The Youthful Female Missionary.Footnote ³⁷

The Reverend John Wilson similarly stressed female agency in the lengthy 1838 memoir of his wife, Margaret Wilson. He was employed by the Scottish Missionary Society in Bombay. He recorded that she fulfilled her wifely duties—providing John with invaluable support by conducting the secular side of the mission and advising and encouraging him in his work—and also started six schools for “native females” with a total of 120 scholars, trained the teachers, set up a school for destitute girls, and formed close links with the local Indian community through welcoming visitors, visiting homes, and learning Marathi to the level where she was able to translate and to write papers for local periodicals.Footnote ³⁸ A woman, the text suggested, could be both a supportive missionary wife and make major independent contributions to the development of girls’ education; she could foster links to the indigenous community both through acting as hostess in the private sphere and through public engagements with indigenous male cultural institutions.

Such individual memoirs continued through the 1840s and into the second half of the nineteenth century. From 1839 onward, however, a new development in the genre occurred with the publication of collective memoirs of missionary women, generally edited by female promoters of missions rather than male missionaries. The earliest of these was Memoirs of Female Labourers in the Missionary Cause, by an anonymous female author. It was the first text to celebrate the lives and work of missionaries’ wives as a group, and its title conveyed the sense of a female collectivity, contrasting the titles of the individual memoirs discussed above, which identified women through association with their missionary husbands. The text also transcended denominational boundaries, reflecting the sense of pan-evangelical solidarity among missionary women, which characterized the operations of the FES. Expressing regret that missionaries’ wives were so little known, with the exception of Mrs. Newell, Mrs. Judson, Mrs. Ellis, Mrs. Wilson, Mrs. Leslie, and Mrs. Smith (most of whose memoirs have been discussed above), it profiles seven other women of various denominations who “hazarded their lives for the sake of Lord Jesus” in India, in the West Indies, in Sierra Leone, and in Greenland, in the hope that their example would “enkindle a like missionary spirit” in readers, and suggested the purchase of batches of the text for distribution to young women and in Sunday schools. The profile of Mrs. Dawson, wife of a missionary in Travancore, echoed earlier memoirs in indicating that women did not simply passively follow husbands into the foreign field; she “diligently attended the Central School in York, with the hope that thus qualified, by learning the National System of Education, she would be enabled to labour among the females of India … if a way in providence was opened for her going thither.” Apparently, providence did find a way, for a year later, “with her husband and the brother whose conversion she had been made the honoured means of, she left England for the East Indies, under the patronage of the Church Missionary Society.”Footnote ³⁹ Her example shows that women could be instrumental in persuading male relatives to become missionaries or could deliberately select missionaries as husbands because they themselves wanted to engage in the missionary project.

This group memoir was followed by the publication in 1841 of Jemima Thompson's Memoirs of British Female Missionaries. Adopting a more assertive tone than that of the “authoress” of the earlier work, she prefaced her text with a strong assertion that “missionary biography ought not … be limited to … laborious and apostolic men.” While the earlier memoirs discussed above indicate that this had not, in fact, been entirely the case, official publications of the missionary societies had continued to marginalize women. Her text can be read as a riposte to the patriarchal tone of the recently published The Fathers and Founders of the London Missionary Society, which, as its title suggests, celebrated the leading men associated with the LMS while ignoring female contributions to the work of the society.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thompson was a Congregationalist whose father had joined the committee of the LMS in 1827, and she was personally acquainted with leading male missionaries, such as John Williams, William Ellis, and Robert Moffat, having met them at missionary parties held in the family home.Footnote ⁴¹

Thompson's memoirs commemorated the work of sixteen women, mainly missionary wives (including Harvard, Ellis, and Wilson and two of the wives featured in Memoirs of Female Labourers) but also including three single women educationalists. One of these was Hannah Kilham, the Quaker whose educational work among freed slaves in Sierra Leone had already been celebrated in a memoir compiled by her daughter-in-law Sarah Biller in 1837, but her inclusion in Thompson's collective memoir helped publicize her activities within the evangelical mainstream.Footnote ⁴² Another was Miss Bird, who, having joined her widowed (nonmissionary) brother in Bengal in 1823, independently set up schools for native girls and visited Hindu women in their own homes, continuing the work after her brother's death and demonstrating the possibility for women to undertake such work regardless of lack of official backing.Footnote ⁴³

Thompson's text, however, was much more than a set of memoirs: it was a kind of manifesto promoting female missionary endeavor. It opened with a long essay on “the importance of female agency in evangelizing pagan nations,” possibly authored by FES founder Baptist W. Noel, and this was followed by Thompson's own extensive “survey of the condition of women in heathen countries.” The introductory essay lamented that many girls “spend several years of the most valuable part of their lives in a kind of restless indolence” and argued that “had they before them some great and benevolent object, such as taking a share in the regeneration of the world, they would be much happier and much more amiable.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Such a religious vocation could offer single women an alternative to what Rivers presents to Jane Eyre as a life in Britain of “selfish ease” and “barren obscurity.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Thompson, in the autobiographical memoir she published in old age, recalls how in 1839, as a young woman, she imagined a missionary future for herself in maternal terms. She would leave her own family in England but create a new home in India through gathering together the “motherless and miserable” as her “adopted children” under the “happy shelter of a Christian home.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In conjuring up a cross-cultural family that a single English woman had the power to create for herself, without the need for a husband, Thompson provided a powerful vision of Christian women's agency in the British Empire. Here is a feminized “Christian psychobiography,” which can be counterposed to the picture of the militant masculinity of St. John Rivers, who is described in the closing chapter of Jane Eyre as engaging in his missionary work with “the sternness of the warrior Greatheart” and “the ambition of the high master-spirit” sharing in “the last mighty victories of the Lamb.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Jemima Thompson was not, however, able to implement her desire to directly engage in this maternal missionary enterprise, and her autobiographical memoir demonstrates how family constraints could stop even the most dedicated of single women from translating new visions of independent female agency into practice. She records that her father, having initially backed her plans to the extent of urging her to become an agent of the LMS, and volunteering to cover the costs of her outfit, passage and allowance, later withdrew his consent. He then also refused to allow her to take up an invitation to become honorary secretary of the FES—despite the fact that he had just been remarried to the sister of its founder, Baptist W. Noel.Footnote ⁴⁸ Her Memoirs of British Female Missionaries, published in 1841, which dates it to just after this crisis in her life, can thus be read not only as a general challenge to the patriarchal nature of missionary organizations but also as a public questioning of her own father's ambivalence about single women's missionary agency. A passage from the section of the text possibly authored by her stepuncle, Noel, may well have given voice to her own frustrated ambitions—the implication was that marriage alone was not an adequate life focus for women, and its call for professional vocational opportunities for middle-class women anticipated feminist demands of the following decade: “All human beings, whether they are men or women, require an object for which to live, i.e., not merely the grand object of preparation for the future life, but a subordinate and immediate one for the present. Women, a little removed from the humbler classes of society, commonly labour, in this respect, under a disadvantage not experienced by men. The latter have some profession on which to enter … but women, have none.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Thompson maintained an interest in the plight of Indian women through marriage, widowhood, and old age, ending her 1900 memoir with a plea to young, single English women to help the still-suffering Hindu widow.Footnote ⁵⁰

Female missionary memoirs published in Britain from 1815 onward thus established that “missionary” could be a female as well as a male noun. They created a feminized form of “Christian psychobiography” that effectively set up missionary wives as inspiring examples to other women, possessed of many of the same qualities of character for which male missionary heroes were celebrated, occupying a crucial public position within the missionary enterprise and working with their “missionary sisters” as well as their husbands as part of a broader Christian family. By 1839, such women began to acquire a collective group identity in addition to their identification with their husbands, and independent female missionary agency also began to be publicly commemorated. When Emma Raymond Pitman published her widely read biographical sketches of female missionaries in 1880, many of the women she featured had been active in the early nineteenth century, indicating how these women were held up as role models to later generations of missionary women.Footnote ⁵¹ However, as Thompson's own experience illustrates, in the early nineteenth century it was still very difficult for single women to overcome familial objections to engage in such work.

Woman's Mission, Christian Privilege, and Imperial Duty

How, then, were promoters of single women's missionary work able to create a vision of female missionary agency within an evangelical culture best known for prescribing subordinate and domestically focused roles for women?Footnote ⁵² Three main resources for this are suggested in this section: first, the internally contradictory nature of evangelical prescriptions for women, in particular the combination of expansive vision and constricting prescription contained within the notion of “woman's mission”; second, the central place accorded both in prescriptive tracts addressed at women and in missionary tracts promoting the conversion of the “heathen” overseas to comparisons between the degraded position of “heathen” women and the elevated position of Christian women; third, the links made between Christian women's privileges and their duties to their less fortunate sisters in the context of assertions of Britain's imperial responsibilities as a Protestant Christian nation.

The concept of “woman's mission” was central to nineteenth-century evangelical discourse about women's social roles. In her widely read 1839 tract of that name, Sarah Lewis claimed for Christian women “no less an office than that of instruments (under God) for the regeneration of the world.” She described mothers as “prime agents of God in the regeneration of mankind”; maternal love, “the only purely unselfish feeling that exists on this earth,” was a revelation of God's love, showing that he intended women “for his missionaries upon earth.” She hastened to add, however, that this exalted mission should not entail moving beyond women's proper sphere: women should exert their influence primarily from their domestic base. Lewis herself acknowledged the seemingly “inconsistent” and “paradoxical” nature of her prescription for women “to recommend at the same time expansion of views and contraction of operation; to awaken the sense of power, and to require that the exercise of it be limited.” Framing her argument both as a riposte to “the warmest advocates of the political rights of woman” and as an advance on earlier evangelical writers who stressed women's domestic duties, she claimed that women were men's moral and intellectual equals but that their value and moral influence depended on self-renunciation rather than public usefulness.Footnote ⁵³

In Lewis's text an exalted notion of woman's mission thus becomes a powerful advocate of “separate spheres”: while she did not explicitly condemn women's missionary work, she set herself against the kind of large-scale organized philanthropic and social reforming work by women that was emerging at this period.Footnote ⁵⁴ Jemima Thompson and others, however, found scope for assertions of female public agency within the paradoxes of this concept of woman's mission. The call in Thompson's 1841 tract for British women to take “a share in the regeneration of the world” perhaps consciously echoed the words of Lewis's tract.Footnote ⁵⁵ However, in urging single women to travel overseas on a vocational educational mission, the text dramatically exceeded the constraints of the spare-time, voluntary, and locally based philanthropy that Lewis deemed as marking the acceptable limits of women's activities beyond home and family.

Women's different but complementary qualities to men, which Lewis and others argued were best cultivated and utilized from a domestic base, were presented in Thompson's tract as particularly suiting them to missionary work among the heathen overseas. Indeed, they were seen as offering a valuable complement to those that men brought to the enterprise. “If less capable of what is bold and hazardous in action, profound in thought, or laborious in investigation, they [women] possess a tenderness of feeling, a depth of compassion, a quickness of perception, and a forgetfulness of self, which are commonly found less extent elsewhere. They appear also generally to manifest a greater facility for the acquisition of languages, as far as the mere power of conversation is concerned; and they can sooner adapt themselves to the prejudices, and win their way to the hearts, of those on whose welfare they are bent.”Footnote ⁵⁶

In envisioning a “woman's mission” that encompassed practical engagement in the missionary project overseas, advocates of “native female education” also drew on another key aspect of evangelical discourse: its stress on the privileges of Christian women and the contrasting degradation of women in non-Christian cultures. This was a feature both of religious tracts aiming to promote piety among British women and of male missionary discourse aimed at gaining governmental and public support for the expansion of missionary work in the Empire. The authorship of these two sets of literature overlapped: some of the leading promoters of foreign missions were also among the leading writers of religious and prescriptive tracts addressed to British women. Thus, Francis Augustus Cox, who is now best known as the author of the first history of the Baptist Missionary Society, in 1817 published Female Scripture Biography, addressed “to the ladies of Great Britain,” which included a long prefatory “essay on what Christianity had done for women.” This contrasted “the picture of female degradation” in pagan antiquity and in contemporary “savage, superstitious and Mahometan countries” with their place under Christianity that “assigns to women their proper place in society” as the respected helpmates of men.Footnote ⁵⁷ Cox's essay was drawn on heavily in 1852 by another prominent evangelical promoter of foreign missions, the Birmingham Congregationalist minister John Angell James, when he produced his highly influential tract Female Piety.Footnote ⁵⁸

Tracts and speeches promoting early foreign missionary enterprise also highlighted the supposed ill treatment and degradation of women in “heathen” lands, with a particular focus on the practice of sati, or widow burning, in India.Footnote ⁵⁹ This discourse also provided the basis for calls to privileged British Christian women to help their suffering heathen sisters.Footnote ⁶⁰ From the mid-1830s, when they took up the work of promoting single women's agency as native female educators, the FES drew on this earlier discourse. The FES and its supporters used a global framework that contrasted the lot of Christian and “heathen” to structure its appeals to British women and to form the basis of the assertion of British women's duty toward their less privileged sisters. “Wives, who are happy in the affectionate esteem of your husbands—mothers, who enjoy your children's reverence and gratitude—children, who have been blest by a mother's example and a mother's care—sisters, who have found in brothers your warmest friends—Christian women, who feel that you can lend to society its charm, and receive from it a loyal courtesy in return—protected, honoured, and loved—impart your blessings to those who are miserable, because they are without them.”Footnote ⁶¹

Indeed, women were presented as benefiting from Christianity even more than men and thus having an even greater duty to help the “heathen.” Thompson's 1841 tract argues that “if all Christians are bound to exert themselves in this cause, surely the obligation which rests on Christian women is fourfold! They, far more than men, owe to Christianity their present free and happy state—while it is on their sex that, in other lands, the hard bondage of heathenism presses with the heavier weight,” and she ends her “survey of the condition of women in heathen countries” with an appeal to British women, elevated by Christianity to “their rightful station and dignity,” to take action in the face of the “present degradation of their sex in Pagan and Mohammedan countries.”Footnote ⁶²

As well as such broad assertions about Christian women's privileges, advocates emphasized the specific privileges and related duties of Protestant British women, giving such appeals a more sectarian, nationalist, and imperialist tone. In the earliest appeals to women to support missionary work and the development of female education, dating from the 1814–20 period, British women were presented as “the natural guardians of these unhappy Widows and Orphans in British India” who had the power to bring about major improvements in the position of Hindu women.Footnote ⁶³ An imperial role for women was articulated in familial terms. After the FES was founded in the mid-1830s, its promoters, while presenting missionary work as a global spiritual project not confined to the limits of Britain's imperial power, emphasized an additional responsibility to areas under British rule.Footnote ⁶⁴ Noel's presentation of British women's work in native female education as assisting a paternalistic imperial project represents an early articulation of the concept of a white woman's burden focused around a duty to rescue victimized non-Western women and complementing the role of male imperial government:

The 1840 report of the Glasgow Association for Promoting Female Education in the East placed British women's missionary work as part of what Brian Stanley has labeled providential imperialism—the belief that Britain's imperial destiny, and particularly its rule in India, was God given:

Thompson also stressed the imperial focus of female missionary endeavor in the preface to her 1841 tract, hoping that “his glory may be promoted among all the tribes of mankind, particularly in our vast colonies, and among all denominations of Christians in the British empire!”Footnote ⁶⁷

Paradoxically then, evangelical discourse, generally seen as encouraging women's confinement within the domestic sphere in Britain, could, through the marriage of the concepts of a woman's mission, Christian female privilege, and providential imperialism, be deployed to create an expansive vision of independent British female agency on the global stage, enacting a maternalistic Christian imperial mission to “heathen” women.

Preaching, Teaching, and the Limits of Female Evangelism Overseas

What, then, were the limits of this vision of female global Christian mission? To what extent did representations of the male missionary and the female Christian educator remain distinct in early nineteenth-century British evangelical literature?

As discussed earlier, one of the clear distinctions between the role of the male missionary and that of the female educator lay in the fact that only men were permitted to engage in public preaching. The distinction between preaching and teaching was not, however, necessarily clear-cut. Men and women shared the designation of “evangelist”: both brought the word of the gospel to the “heathen.” As early as 1815 the role of female teaching as a substitute for male preaching in the foreign mission field was being publicly encouraged. The Missionary Register of that year included a “call on British females,” in the form of a letter addressed to the secretary of the Church Missionary Society, purportedly from an Indian woman of Christian parentage, that urged British women to bring the word of the gospel to women in purdah who could not benefit from the preaching of male missionaries.Footnote ⁶⁸

W. M. Harvard's 1824 memoir of his wife Elizabeth, who worked alongside him in the Wesleyan mission in Ceylon from 1814 to 1818, includes an interesting negotiation of this line between preaching and teaching by women, discussed in relation not just to a mission to women but also to men. He records that, when accompanying him on his missionary excursions around the island, “such was the ardour of her soul for the conversions of those benighted idolators” that she made use of their interpreter to say something to them herself regarding Christianity. Aware that this suggested she was preaching, he hastened to add that “she never, indeed, conceived that the occupation of the pulpit fell within her line of duty.” Writing at a time when Wesleyans were debating the propriety of female preaching, he clarified: “Whatever she might have conceded, in that respect, to the peculiar impressions of duty professed by others, her own views of female obligation, led to a different conclusion with respect to herself.” In other words, she did not condemn other women for preaching but felt it was not her role to do so. Rather, she saw teaching as an appropriate substitute: “yet, she was apt to teach; and with a heart overflowing with the most unaffected love for her race, she generally acted—in a humbler mode—under a sense of duty to impact what little she knew of divine things to any one whom she had reason to suspect had less knowledge of them than herself.” Here the term “teach” seems to encompass more than schooling and to refer more broadly to the verbal outpouring of Christian knowledge. In adopting this evangelizing role among men as well as women, she justified it as appropriate in the particular circumstance of foreign missionary work: “in a heathen land, she felt perfectly at liberty to act on this principle.” Her husband endorsed her stance: “she was never more truly amiable, than when thus employed.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Mary Ann Wilson (née Cooke), the first single, female Christian educator in India, shared this belief that women's evangelism need not be entirely confined to their mission to women—they might also be instruments for the conversion of men. In a letter dated February 1835, published as an appendix to a sermon by the Reverend Baptist Noel on behalf of the FES, she argued that women are “as much required as Missionaries, and may be as useful in evangelising these pagan countries.” For “true, they would come forth in the first instance to teach children, but by no means stop there. They would also endeavour to use every opportunity of giving religious instruction to adults, whether male or female.”Footnote ⁷⁰

It is interesting to read the quotes above in the context of Keinzle and Walker's recent study of female preaching through two millennia of Christianity. They point out “how closely religious teaching approximates preaching” and show “how the boundaries between the two could be purposely blurred to create a space for female voices.” However, they also note that such moves were counteracted by attempts to sharpen boundaries between male and female religious activity, by asserting a narrow definition of preaching that confined it to the sermons delivered by authorized clerics in the context of a formal religious service.Footnote ⁷¹

Just such a contest over boundaries took place over the role of the FES and the question of female evangelists in a public exchange of 1836–37 in the pages of the Christian Lady's Magazine, an influential monthly periodical edited by the popular religious writer Charlotte Elizabeth Phelan (afterward, Charlotte Elizabeth Phelan Tonna). The exchange shows how the question of single women and missions was part of a broader struggle within British society to define the limits of the women's sphere.

Charlotte Elizabeth was an Evangelical Anglican, a Tory, a supporter of antislavery, and a strong advocate of factory reform to improve the plight of laboring women; she wrote the first piece on the FES to appear in the magazine.Footnote ⁷² Publicizing the formation of the society to help “our poor eastern sisters,” she argued that this work was becoming an important branch of missionary work among the “heathen,” and gave the employment of single women as Christian educators important mainstream endorsement as a “truly Christian, truly feminine undertaking.”Footnote ⁷³

The following year, “Lydia,” a supporter of the FES, stressed the powerful influence, for good or ill, of women on the nature of society in all nations. Then, drawing the attention of young Christian women to the terrible situation of “millions of their sisters in the east,” she urged them to go over and help those pioneering women who were already laboring to bring them to Christ. While “hitherto it has been chiefly the allotment of Christian women to work for their Lord and Master in the quiet and unobtrusive walks of domestic privacy,” women were now being called “to do the work of an evangelist,” which she defined as “proclaiming the glad tidings of salvation.” Here evangelism is presented as public speaking by women rather than simply teaching, although the term “preaching” is not explicitly used. Although presenting this as a break from the past, as a new call from the Lord, rather than something justified by biblical precedent, she also presented it as fulfilling God's allotted role for women to be “an help meet for man.” This attempt to place her call within the acceptable bounds of an auxiliary and supportive role was, however, contradicted by the tone of much of her appeal. She presented female evangelism in a heroic and glorious light: an opportunity for women “to distinguish themselves in the eyes of the great Captain of Salvation, and win from him a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” In a final rousing passage, she urged women to “resolve, that if the hands of woman were foremost to pluck of the tree of knowledge of good and evil those hands also shall be foremost to plant that tree of life which is for the healing of the nations, in every quarter of the globe which ‘sin unto death’ yet reigns in unmitigated bitterness.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Lydia's text conveys a great sense of the power of women and a direct challenge to male supremacy—far from simply men's helpers, women have the capacity to be “foremost” in spreading Christianity. This female “Christian psychobiography” used the language of the male missionary hero (such as Rivers in Jane Eyre) more than the generally acceptable evangelical language of separate spheres and feminine self-effacement. Lydia seems to be claiming a full missionary role for women, encompassing preaching as well as teaching.

That Charlotte Elizabeth was willing to give space to this radical vision of female missionary agency in her magazine is interesting, suggesting she did not consider it completely out of line with mainstream evangelical thinking. However, immediate criticism of the tone of Lydia's article came in the form of a letter from G.H.G. The author asserted that “I cannot see any ground for supposing that the work of an ‘evangelist’ (that is, a professed teacher of the gospel,) is in any manner suited to a female.” For a woman to be a missionary's wife was acceptable, but anything more went beyond her sphere as delineated in the Scriptures: “The whole tenor of Scripture leads me to believe that women's path, with very few exceptions, is intended to be a retiring, unobtrusive one, and that, when unsupported by a husband's countenance, missionary labours are out of her sphere of duty.” Religious philanthropic work by single women was fine if undertaken in a private capacity close to home: “I am very far from asserting that single as well as married women ought not zealously to do their utmost to win souls to Christ, but then it must be in a private, not a public capacity, in their own neighbourhood, among the poor and ignorant.” In contrast, if a woman were to “throw off that ‘shamefacedness’ which ought to adorn her, and sally forth alone to distant lands, as a missionary” she would not only be acting outside her sphere but also “shocking the deep-rooted prejudices of those she most wishes to conciliate.” In other words, her work was not only inappropriate but also unlikely to be effective because it would alienate gender norms in distant lands—an interesting line of criticism given that missionaries claimed that they wished to reform rather than condone indigenous gender relations!Footnote ⁷⁵

This seems a powerful condemnation of single women's work in the missionary field, and the closing passage of the letter, approvingly quoting the opinion of an unnamed public figure that “women in the present day take too prominent a part in religious societies,” can be read in this context as hostile not only to the FES but also to organized female philanthropy more broadly. Interestingly, though, while drawing attention to those passages in the Bible that stressed wives’ duties to husbands as providing guidelines for the role of women in the church, the author also drew on biblical precedent to suggest the possibility of a wider role for small numbers of exceptional women: “There have been, and still are, ‘Mothers in Israel,’ who, like Deborah of old, are honoured as instruments of public usefulness in the great Redeemer's hand: but these appear to me exceptions, to the general rule; and I cannot but think that an exhortation to women, to cast off the retiring modesty of their sex, and to put themselves forward even in so good a cause as the conversion of the heathen, is likely to prove anything but beneficial to them.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The space is thus left open for individual single women with a true religious calling to become public evangelists overseas—and the author does not even explicitly restrict that role to the teaching of girls and women along the lines promoted by the FES. Indeed the reference to “exceptional” women echoes the language of Wesley's early condonation of female preaching. What starts as a reactionary condemnation of a wider role for women thus turns into a willingness to question any all-encompassing prescription of women's sphere.

The FES's own attitude to the designation and role of its women educators was a cautious one. G.H.G.'s letter in the Christian Ladies’ Magazine prompted a response in a letter to the editor from J.S., which probably represents the organization's official line. Defending the work of the FES and its female educators, it sought to reassure readers of the journal by presenting a narrow interpretation of Lydia's call to women to do “the work of an evangelist,” claiming that she did not mean that women should do “unfeminine” work by taking on the role of (male) missionaries, who traveled around preaching to large crowds. The author also claimed that the work of the FES's agents took the form of teaching undertaken unobtrusively under the protection of resident missionary families.Footnote ⁷⁷

Despite the set of early nineteenth-century memoirs of missionary wives and female educators that claimed for women the title of “female missionaries,” the FES's official publications continued to distinguish carefully between (male) missionaries, missionary wives, and the female superintendents of schools, whom it described as its “agents.” It also described its activities as “auxiliary to the general cause of missions,” thus downplaying the fact that it was an independent society. Already operating at the margins of appropriate activity for women, having successfully defined its own feminine sphere of expertise, and depending for success in the field on cooperation with the main missionary societies, particularly the Church Missionary Society, it presumably did not wish to be seen as directly challenging existing hierarchies within the movement. The title of its 1850 history, Female Agency among the Heathen, while serving to emphasize women's active and initiative-taking roles, avoided appropriation of the term “missionary,” and this cautious approach seems to have prevailed until 1854, when it launched a magazine entitled The Female Missionary Intelligencer. This made constant references to the missionary labors of both married and single women and included in its first volume a “female missionary hymn” and an article entitled “Counsel to a Female Missionary” that addressed her as woman, Christian, teacher, and missionary.Footnote ⁷⁸ Even now, however, the role of female missionary was defined as distinct from that of men, focusing as earlier on female education.Footnote ⁷⁹

Conclusion

Returning, then, to the question posed at the beginning of this article: could women be missionaries in the early nineteenth century? To what extent were Cunningham and Spivak correct in suggesting that women could not lay claim to either the title or the persona of “missionary” at this period? The evidence of early female missionary memoirs shows that, contra Cunningham, missionary was not an exclusively “male noun” at this period, despite the fact that foreign missionary societies only directly employed men as missionaries. These memoirs helped to counteract the marginalization of women's contributions in the publications of the male-run missionary societies. Their authors, often the missionary husbands of the women commemorated, publicly celebrated missionaries’ wives as female missionaries. They presented their role as a public one, despite its lack of formal status. Single women who worked as Christian educators in the foreign mission field also began to be commemorated as female missionaries, despite the fact that the FES itself avoided the term until the mid-1850s.

The existence of the genre of female missionary memoir also shows that what Spivak labels “Christian psychobiography” was not, as she suggests, an exclusively masculine discourse in early nineteenth-century Britain. As this article has shown, representations of missionary women's agency exploited the openings offered by contradictions within early evangelical discourse on women, bringing together concepts of women's mission, Christian women's privilege, and providential imperialism to create an expansive vision of female missionary agency. They are suggestive of the range of positions that could be articulated within evangelicalism as to the nature and appropriate social roles of women.

Thus Charlotte Brontë could have ascribed to Jane Eyre independent agency as a “soul maker.” She might have had her select as a husband a missionary who, unlike Rivers, was willing to accept her as a near-equal partner in the missionary enterprise—as were the husbands who authored the memoirs discussed above. Or she might have had her engage as a single woman as an agent of the FES—whose supporters presented the mothering of “heathen” girls overseas as a positive alternative to British-based domesticity, a self-sufficient vocational alternative to married dependence. She could have created a female version of the “Christian psychobiography” that she narrated for Rivers and presented Jane as a zealous participant in and brave martyr to the cause, motivated more by missionary vocation than by romantic love or a sense of wifely duty. That Charlotte Brontë did not opt to do so should be read, not as a reflection of the limited imaginings of female agency in early nineteenth-century Britain, but rather as her conscious authorial choice. Perhaps it says more about her prioritizing the reform of English domesticity at home over the feminizing of imperial mission overseas. In this she anticipates the priorities of the organized feminist movement, which emerged less than ten years after Jane Eyre was published. The women of the Langham Place Circle, many of them Unitarians and thus outside the evangelical fold, showed little interest in missionary work and focused on improving women's lives within the British metropole rather than on the emancipation of colonized women.Footnote ⁸⁰

What, then, is the relationship between the representations of female missionary agency discussed in this article and what Spivak labels a “nascent feminist scenario”? Early promoters of female missionary activity were certainly not advocates of liberal feminist individualism: they did not openly challenge patriarchal male authority or the ideology of separate spheres, and they did not call for female social equality or women's rights. However, carving out a psychological space for female agency and articulating a distinctive female imperial mission at the heart of the evangelical project challenged hegemonic understandings of the appropriate nature and role of middle-class women: the belief that such women were weak and should be protected, that they should remain in the family home and a circumscribed local social circle until marriage, and that their destiny was marriage and motherhood rather than an active role in the wider world beyond the bounds of home and of nation. Promoters of women's foreign missionary work emphasized the interlinking of public and private spheres, the possibility of combining self-sacrifice with self-fulfillment, and the overlapping of both the qualities of character and the roles of male and female missionaries. Nevertheless, there were limits to their vision. Writing at a time when women's preaching was frowned on within the evangelical mainstream, they in the main avoided claiming that the role of the female missionary was identical to that of the male, although it might be of equal importance. As we have seen, an enthusiastic suggestion in the Christian Lady's Magazine that women might play the leading public role in evangelizing the heathen met with horror from one reader and a reassurance from the FES that its agents would remain within the bounds of acceptable feminine behavior.

The powerful vision of feminine imperial mission developed in early nineteenth-century Britain was thus not identical to the “imperial feminism” that Antoinette Burton has identified as current from the 1860s onward.Footnote ⁸¹ Despite a shared preoccupation with the plight of Indian women, their respective conceptualizations of British women's imperial agency differed. Missionary women articulated a Christian duty to their suffering sisters by spreading Victorian ideals of female domesticity, whereas suffragists linked their own political emancipation to their role as saviors of Indian women. Missionary women tended to present their work as complementing rather than challenging the agendas of male missionaries or imperial government, whereas suffragists linked their claim for equal political rights to a critique of male imperial policy.

However, historians are increasingly questioning the adequacy of a purely secular model for understanding nineteenth-century feminism, and the evangelical religious commitment that drove and sustained feminist Josephine Butler during her outspoken leadership of the campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts on both domestic and imperial stages cautions us against drawing too rigid a divide between women's missionary agency and “imperial feminism.”Footnote ⁸² Further research into women's activism in the late 1850s and 1860s is needed in order to tease out possible connections between the emergence of an organized women's rights movement, the upsurge in female preaching associated with the second evangelical revival, and the beginnings of the recruitment of women by the major foreign missionary societies. The relationship between evangelical religion, cultural imperialism, and the development of modern Western feminism is, as this article has demonstrated, a complex one.