The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole (review)

This important book contributes to a growing body of scholarship which complicates our understanding of women's historical relationship to Christianity. Through a focus on British women's missionary work in Uganda and Madagascar in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Elizabeth E. Prevost discusses the emergence of a "Christianized ideology of women's rights" (8)—what she terms "missionary feminism" (10)— and the role it played in developing an expansive religious sphere for women in the mission field and for feminism in Britain. Central to Prevost's argument is her critical engagement with the notion of "imperial feminism" (9). She argues that although women who had flooded the mission field as independent missionaries from the 1860s took with them a range of imperial assumptions (about Christians and heathens, Europeans and Africans, the sacred and the secular, et cetera), these were challenged, modified, and mediated by the female missionaries' spiritual relationships with African women. The Communion of Women is, then, a story of the transformation of missionary women as well as of missionary subjects.

Prevost develops this argument through a focus on women's missionary involvement in the (High Church) Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Madagascar (chapter 1) and the (evangelical) Church Missionary Society in Uganda (chapter 2) from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s and 1930s. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the work of the Mothers' Union in both countries in the period up to 1930. These chapters explore the role of the Mothers' Union in shaping a successful alternative to male-dominated structures, representing work with families as central to the missionary project, and extending the work of the mission to include married women's religious labour and leadership. Prevost's discussion of the negotiations around Christian womanhood and Western forms of marriage in these chapters make for fascinating reading. Thoroughly researched and densely argued, they use both published missionary writings and reports and more informal letters to missionary societies by individual women to explore both women's attempts to shape the mission and the impact their missionary subjects had on that effort.

The second section of the book turns attention to the imperial metropole. While I am not altogether convinced that chapter 5 demonstrates that "gendered missionary discourse defined new experiments and movements to feminize authority in Britain as well as in the wider British and Anglican worlds" (199, emphasis added), Prevost's evidence certainly suggests that the missionaries' effort combined with endeavours by feminists and others to critique empire and raise questions about race and gender inequality, as well as to assist in the formulation of internationalist responses to the First World War. Prevost's central argument is compelling: that the range of responses to missions at home included, but were not confined to, the creation of an imperial culture, extending to inspire more liberal and progressive movements, including movements for women's ordination. This has implications for gender history, and Prevost's discussion of the suffragist League of the Church Militant in chapter 6 in particular serves as a timely reminder of the (long-neglected) progressive Christian international/transnational context for the development of feminism in Britain; Prevost reveals the ways in which feminism was rooted in women's creative and flexible engagement with a range of religious communities.

Building on a literature that has successfully explored the complexity of African engagement with Christianity, The Communion of Women argues for a similar appreciation of the agency of missionary women. "The fact that the churches that spread in Africa looked very different to those in Britain was due as much to missionary as to African agency," Prevost writes, "and women missionaries played crucial roles in brokering the indigenous and colonial politics of religion" (7). Ultimately, she argues, the missionary movement requires a more sophisticated analysis than the argument that Western women expanded their sphere at...