The Communion of Women Missions and Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole

Elizabeth Prevost examines the massive Protestant campaign of female missionary expansion between the 1860s and 1930s, through a comparison of Anglican women's experience in Uganda and Madigascar. She explores the impact of these women's endeavours on the women themselves, the mission contexts in which they worked, and on the British church and society from which they came and to which most returned. She argues that the large-scale involvement of women in missionwork contributed to a 'missionary feminism' that relied on 'feminized discourse of spirituality', and that this had a widespread and long-lasting impact.

Elizabeth E. Prevost is Assistant Professor of History at Grinnell College.