A heart that has felt the love of god and longs for others to know it: Conventions of gender, tensions of self and constructions of difference in offering to be a lady missionary

Women's History Review

Volumn 7, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 171-193

  Haggis, Jane ^a  

^a FLINDERS UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 4243617676     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612029800200170     Document Type: Review

References (32)

1. Martha Vicinus (1985) Independent Women: work and community for single women 1850-1920, p. 1 (London: Virago).
2. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: work and community for single women 1850-1920, Ibid., p. 4.
3. SPFEE (1847) History of the Society for Promoting Female Education in the East, p. 7 (London).
4. Jemima Luke (1900) Early Years of My Life, p. 124 (London: Hodder & Stoughton).
5. Leonore Davidoff & Catherine Hall (1987) Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson) shows the vital part religion played in the formation of the English middle class and its gender order in the first half of the century, but there are few similar in-depth studies of religion and gender for the second part of the century.
6. John MacKenzie (Ed.) (1986) Propaganda and Empire: the manipulation of public opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press) and other titles in the Studies in Imperialism series edited by MacKenzie have been particularly influential in this endeavour.
7. See especially Claudia Knapman (1986) White Women in Fiji, 1935-1930: the ruin of empire? (Sydney: Allen & Unwin);
8. Helen Callaway (1987) Gender, Culture and Empire: European women in colonial Nigeria (London: Maemillan);
9. Margaret Strobel (1991) European Women and the Second British-Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press);
10. Nupur Chaudhuri & Margaret Strobel (Eds) (1992) Western Women and Imperialism: complicity and resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press);
11. Kumari Jayawardena (1995) The White Woman's Other Burden: Western women and South Asia during British rule (New York and London: Routledge);
12. Janaki Nair (1991) Reconstructing and reinterpreting the history of women in India, Journal of Women 's History, 3, pp. 8-34;
13. Jane Haggis (1990) Gendering colonialism or colonising gender? Recent women's studies approaches to white women and the history of British colonialism, Women's Studies International Forum, 12, pp. 105-112;
14. P. Grimshaw, Paths of Duty, American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth Century Hawaii (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press);
15. Margaret Jolly (1991) 'To save the girls for brighter and better lives", Presbyterian missions and women in the south of Vanuatu - 1848-1870, Journal of Pacific History, 26, pp. 2748;
16. Jane Hunter (1984) The Gospel of Gentility: American women missionaries in turn-of-the-century China (New Haven and London: Yale University Press).
17. Most comprehensively to date in Antoinette Burton (c.1994) The Burdens of History, British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).
18. India's Women: the Magazine of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society (1884) p. 180.
19. Antoinette Burton (1996) Contesting the zenana: the mission to make 'Lady Doctors for India', 1874-1885, Journal of British Studies, 35, pp. 368-397.
20. London Missionary Society (1913) What Are the Qualifications Needed for a Lady Missionary? 5th edn, p. 10;
21. Rosemary Seton (1996) 'Open doors for female labourers': women candidates of the London Missionary Society, 1875-1914, in Robert A Bickers & Rosemary Seton (Eds) Missionary Encounters: sources and issues, pp. 50-69 (Surrey: Curzon Press) also traces a process of professionalisation in a more broad-ranging survey of the LMS archives, although she does not focus on the role of imperial discourses and the colonising images of Indian women in this process.
22. Joan Perkin (1988) Women and Marriage in Nineteenth Century England, p. 30 (London, Routledge).
23. See Carol Dyhouse (1981) Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge);
24. Lee Holcombe (1973) Ladies at Work: middle class working women in England and Wales 1850-1914 (Hamden, CT: Archon Press).
25. The call for a distinct medical mission to Indian women, requiring medically trained women, grew in voice through the late 1860s and the early 1870s. Blake traces how the arguments for women doctors in India were an important influence in the general debate over female doctors during the 1870s, being brought to public attention through The Times and in Parliament. She states that by 1880 "there was general acceptance that women with a full medical education were needed in India" (Catriona Blake [1990] The Charge of the Parasols: women's entry to the medical profession, pp. 175-177 [London, Women's Press].
26. See also Rosemary Fitzgerald [1996] A 'peculiar and exceptional measure': the call for women medical missionaries for India in the later nineteenth century, in Bickers & Seton [Eds] Missionary Encounters, pp. 174-196).
27. Burton's research into the London School of Medicine for Women's archives confirms the importance of the call to help Indian women in facilitating legitimation of the need for trained female doctors. She also argues that the decade from the mid-1870s saw a "contest of authority going on between British female medical missionaries doing de facto medical work among potential native converts and 'scientifically qualified lady doctoresses', - that is, those trained from the 1870s onward either at the London School or in other degree-granting institutions" (Antoinette Burton [1996] Contesting the zenana: the mission to make 'Lady Doctors for India', 1874-1885, Journal of British Studies, p. 370). Without wishing to contest the overall thrust of this argument, it risks overplaying the secular orientation of those pursuing full qualification of women doctors and underplaying the commitment of the missionary movement to supplying the best qualified female medical assistance possible to the mission field. The tensions between spiritual and more worldly means of reaching the 'heathen', and the appropriateness of expending donated funds on the latter, was an ongoing debate within the missionary movement, especially over medical missions - male or female.
28. For a discussion of the analogy drawn between the working-class 'native' at home and the colonial 'native' see Jane Haggis, Good wives and mothers or dedicated workers: contradictions of domesticity in the mission of sisterhood, Travancore, South India, in Kalpana Ram & Margaret Jolly (Eds) (1998) Maternities and Modernities: colonial and postcolonial experiences in Asia and the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
29. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, pp. 723-724.
30. See Phillippa Levine (1990) Feminist Lives in Victorian England:private roles and public commitment (London: Basil Blackwell).
31. especially chapter 2 which documents the close family connections between leading women activists and liberal and nonconformist circles. Susan Thorne (1990) Protestant ethics and the spirit of imperialism: British Congregationalists and the London Missionary Society, 1795-1925, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Michigan, ch. 5, documents the connections between commercial men, Liberals and the missionary organisations in the provinces.
32. Mrs Emma Raymond Pitman (c. 1881) Heroines of the Mission Field, Biographical Sketches of Female Missionaries who have Laboured in Various Lands among the Heathen (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co.).