Anglican women missionaries and the culture of spirituality in Africa, 1865--1930 (Madagascar, Great Britain)

This dissertation charts the formative years of Anglican women's professional missionary work in Madagascar, Uganda, and Britain. The unprecedented scale of women's involvement in British foreign missions between 1865 and 1930 grew out of organized efforts at home to professionalize female evangelism, promote white women's distinctive vocation of converting "heathen" women, and consolidate the religious framework of the British Empire. Yet this dissertation argues that mission work did not simply transplant metropolitan paradigms of femininity, imperialism, and Protestant Christianity onto African soil. Instead, women missionaries selectively deployed and contested European and indigenous cultural and religious practices in response to their encounters with African women. More specifically, British women formulated a spiritual dialogue with African women in order to confront the patriarchal systems of power that they perceived as governing colonial and indigenous social structures. This feminized discourse of Anglican spirituality fostered solidarity between British and African women-first in local mission communities, and eventually on a global level. In the process, women missionaries reworked their own understandings of Britishness, Christianity, and womanhood, revealing that mission Christianity was not a fixed imperial ideology but rather a dynamic and flexible system of beliefs and practices.; I have organized the dissertation around three case studies from Madagascar and Uganda, which draw on extensive archival material in documenting the religious and cultural politics of mission education, female conversion, and marriage and motherhood through the institutional lens of three Anglican organizations: the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the Church Missionary Society, and the Mothers' Union, respectively. I frame these in-depth studies with broader discussions of how the Anglican women's missionary movement interrogated the boundaries of, and intersections between, gender and imperialism in a changing international climate. By considering local African mission communities in conjunction with British and global social movements, this project shows that the mission field did not merely function as an extension of the colonial enterprise, but was instead a mutually constitutive site of gender, religious, and cultural formation with unexpected outcomes in Africa and the colonial metropole.