In the 1990s Margaret Stroebel's Western Women and Imperialism (1992) offered a first dedicated examination of women in empire, offering the challenge that women not only participated in modern empire, their stories waiting to be recovered, but also that gendering an approach to modern empire would result in novel interpretations of empire and its meaning. Thirty years on, gendering the analysis of race and class has resulted in some of the richest streams mined in recent imperial history. Applying a feminist lens has enabled scholars to make sense of disparities in what was a vast empire, growing during a period of economic growth and political turmoil, and reordered because of that change. Scholars such as Catherine Hall have offered strong evidence that we simply cannot understand the process of becoming modern without analyzing ways in which masculinities and femininities changed across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Philippa Levine's scholarship has extended this to empire, arguing decisively that the very imperial policy formed in board rooms and on warships was in part influenced by, and in turn shaped, relationships right down into bedrooms across the world. Alongside this burgeoning field of new imperial history, another literature contesting and revealing the contribution of religion to empire has also received important attention. Scholars such as Andrew Porter have argued that while missions spread as part of the informal apparatus of modern empires, their links to the formal institutions of empire must be examined with care. Missions expanded exponentially in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and as Rosemary Seton's study presents, women—the paid agents of mission societies, the female relatives of missionaries, and the volunteer supporters of church auxiliaries and mission societies—played a significant role in the growth and continued existence of these evangelical institutions.

Seton skillfully organizes her study around the professional training of a female missionary, offering an analysis of the gendering of mission as a profession. She outlines the development of early missions, providing a comprehensive analysis of the background and training of the British women who chose to become missionaries in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The next sections of the text follow the maturing of a professional life, focusing in turn on the interrelated topics of the personal and the professional. Developing the argument through detailed case studies, the third chapter describes recruits' experiences of traveling to and living in a new country, living in community with colleagues, and women's relationships with the local community. The following chapter begins with the case study of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society and follows the creation of the administrative bodies that hired and focused on women's work. It then depicts the maturing of such institutions at home and abroad. Seton argues that while the cultural, gendered expectations that shaped secular society were largely paralleled within missions, the reform movements of the nineteenth century largely failed to influence evangelical missionaries. Missionaries were not feminists, and those who did advocate for a degree of independence and supervisory independence did so as Christian feminists; it was belief that gave them the authority to argue, and not rights theory.

Chapters 5 and 6 are perhaps the strongest of the study. In them Seton draws on her wealth of knowledge of the mission archive to present a clear image of the work at which female missionaries were thought to excel—and at which many of them did. What could be seen as limiting, that women's supposed natural abilities qualified them to be teachers, nurses, and later doctors, actually brought an undoubtable strength to missions. In an era where a great deal of breath and ink was spilled over the efficacy of evangelization as opposed to institution building, women's practical work within institutions created the sort of connections that impacted their students and patients whether they converted or not. As Robert Frykenberg has argued, they left behind in Asia a powerful institutional memory the meaning of which scholars strive to understand. Seton ends her study by focusing on the exceptional women who took up what one male missionary termed the “most manly” of mission work—the work of an itinerant evangelist. Such women were able to function in foreign languages, travel, and live rough, often away from their European colleagues for months at a time. They worked with catechists and evangelists from local communities. These sections of the text are particularly compelling, perhaps because it is the last three chapters that present the reader with both the most vivid images of station life and an evaluation of the value of the work performed, as well as with the women themselves, through the eyes of the communities into which they imposed themselves. For example, while it is heartbreaking to read about the early death of Dr. Isabel Mitchell in Faku, Manchuria, it is compelling to read about the response of the community in which she had practiced medicine—a community that mostly had not converted to Christianity but that was impressed by her knowledge and dedication to their well-being (155–56). In their communal response to her death is evidence of the varied manner in which mission activities impacted communities, and in another study it would be fascinating to read further analysis of that complex interface.

This book is impeccably presented and carefully researched and argued. It addresses a significant subject in itself, a subject about which Seton's qualifications are unparalleled. It also contains a good number of clearly reproduced images that significantly add to its arguments. For future study, there remains much work to be done. It would be important to include British Roman Catholic women in the analysis, which would require further elucidation of the relationship between formal and informal empire. It would also be interesting to examine further the way in which the national identity of missionaries in organizations like the London Missionary Society, and in particular the Church Inland Mission, influenced their faith, perspective, work, and ability to work with each other. In addition, a comparative study of the work of and ability to interact between Protestants from continental Europe and the New World is waiting to be written. But these questions are the sign of a good study, one that leaves the reader asking for more. At 217 pages of text, this study is packed with detailed information, but it is entirely readable and accessible in style. It offers an important overview to the history of gender in modern British Protestant missions and would offer a useful counterpoint to more broadly focused material in a course focused on empire, or a superb case study of the experience of modern professionalizing Western women in a course on women's history. It should be of interest to both scholars and those outside academe.