Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800-1940 by Sue Morgan Jacqueline de Vries

Author:Sue Morgan, Jacqueline de Vries [Sue Morgan, Jacqueline de Vries]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415232135
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2010-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Becoming professional and shaping the profession

What did mission work look like? Male missionaries were ministers and pastors; they established churches, attracted congregations, preached and proselytised. In each of the missions under consideration, men hired in the early nineteenth century were of artisanal origins and the majority of them were ordained. A successful missionary candidate was willing to undertake any task necessary. Once ‘in the field’ he might be required to turn his hand to writing, printing and translating both religious and other material. Missionaries were also required to negotiate contracts, build houses and plough fields, or to supervise such work. Scots like Alexander Duff (1806–78; India 1829) created policies that shaped the colonial world. His evangelicalism influenced both missions in India and government education policy that education in the subcontinent – be it in the vernacular language or English – offered the most important opportunity for conversion.25 Teaching took place in purpose-built schools, unfurnished rooms and out-of-doors. From the 1830s until the education debates of the 1880s, missions built secondary institutions that developed into universities around the world – in India, southern Africa, New Zealand, the eastern USA and Canada.26 Missionaries also lobbied colonial governments, fed the victims of famine and opened orphanages and refuges. These practices often drew criticisms from evangelicals who worried that such work was too secular in nature.

Although the presence and activity of women is not explicitly outlined in this portrait, they were certainly there. British women joined missions as the relatives of male missionaries. They worked hard as wives and mothers establishing western-style homes in unfamiliar places. Women acted as a moral shield, protecting white men from the indigenous culture. And while they modelled ‘the’ Christian family, they corresponded with supporters and wrote for the myriad of mission-related magazines published in this period. These same women instigated the mission schools, hospitals and social work passed on to the first wave of women hired in their own right from the 1860s onwards as single mission workers.27 By the 1890s women in missions, in both formal and informal capacities, as outlined above, outnumbered men globally28 and, as will be discussed later, locally hired mission workers outnumbered the British mission workers at least ten to one.29

Yet even the professional women were not considered equivalent to their male counterparts. Instead single women were assessed according to their ‘ladylike qualities’. As recruitment standards changed towards the end of the century, female candidates were expected to demonstrate quantifiable vocational qualifications as well as religious commitment. But this professionalisation of female mission workers was still shaped by the gendered expectations of nineteenth-century middle-class British society, as we saw earlier applied to Florence Syrett. Women were limited by a lack of educational qualifications and work experience and did not fit easily into a male professional model of training, remuneration and professional status. At the same time, women who applied to missions did so on the wider cultural expectation that they, as respectable British women, were ‘qualified’ to change those colonial cultures currently frustrating conversion efforts.

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