Modern Women Modernizing Men: The Changing Missions of Three Professional Women in Asia and Africa, 1902-69 (review)

As a study of three Canadian missionaries who went to India, Korea, and Africa between the two wars, Modern Women Modernizing Men: The Changing Missions of Three Professional Women in Asia and Africa, 1902-69 goes beyond the theme of domesticity that has dominated research on missions and women. Instead, Ruth Compton Brouwer treats the women in question as professionals who worked outside of the realm of the domestic. Focusing on the careers of Choné Oliver, Florence Murray, and Margaret Wrong, Brouwer effectively argues that while these women operated under a 'feminist consciousness,' they did not limit themselves to the 'women's work for women' paradigm of earlier missions. This enabled them to work with multiple groups of men and women with whom they shared overlapping interests as well as suffered occasional differences and hostilities. Brouwer's discussion of the ways in which Oliver, Murray, and Wrong carried out their goals in the face of everyday challenges from bureaucracies, local officials, missionary organizations, nationalist leaders, anthropologists, and academics uncovers a fascinating 'missionary world in transition' in imperialistic contexts and their own complicated location within this world.

In chapter 1, Brouwer details such insights through an overview of the changes taking place in the world of missions during the period of interwar imperialism and examines the implications of these changes for the careers of Oliver, Murray, and Wrong. To understand their position against the backdrop of these changes, she amplifies, in chapters 2, 3, and 4, their respective projects. Chapter 2 covers Oliver's establishment of a Christian Medical College in late colonial India in the face of financial and bureaucratic obstacles. Chapter 3 discusses the interwar career of Murray in Korea. And chapter 4 links the role of Wrong in the production and promotion of African literature under the auspices of the ICCLA (International Committee on Christian Literature for Africa) and its implications for the development of 'gendered patterns of literary production in Africa.' Brouwer's scholarly approach, which combines archival sources, public records, periodicals, interviews, personal diaries, biographical information, and literary texts, makes these case studies highly interesting, alive, complex, and convincing. At the same time, elaborating critically on claims regarding Christianity 'as a modernizing vehicle among various colonized and non-Western people' through an inclusion of local voices and perceptions of ordinary people would provide a deeper understanding of local cultural complexities and responses to missionary work and 'modernization.' To this end, clarifying the premise underlying terms and phrases such as 'most advanced societies' and the 'special gifts and goals of indigenous Christianity' would further advance an understanding of assumptions about Native cultures that underpinned historical processes steeped in unequal relations of power.

Overall, Brouwer's book is an important contribution on many levels and will appeal to a wide range of readers. It promotes an understanding of the history of missions and the specific knowledge about the role of women in these missions and their 'feminist consciousness.' Her attention to Oliver's work in establishing the place of Western medicine in India - a move that was inspired by her sense of medical commitment yet was firmly rooted in the Christian faith - throws a new light on missionary medicine as an aspect of the social history of Western medicine, and the implications of women's involvement in the capacity of teachers and practitioners of medicine in other parts of the world, for missions. And finally, Wrong's involvement with African literature, which forced a reassessment of the definition of 'literature' under the liberal missionary and colonial reform initiatives of which she was a part, opens up another interesting chapter for students and scholars of literature.