Gendered Missions: Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice ed. by Mary Taylor Huber and Nancy C. Lutkehaus (review)

304book reviews gall's lower choir windows for Reims Cathedral might have been fruitfully compared to his Jerusalem Synagogue windows. The book ends on a note of great optimism. The Church survived the revolutions of the twentieth century; God is alive; religion flourishes as does Christian art. But there is a problem. We begin with the premise that art is good, spiritual, communal, that it should elevate society. Christian art is treated as didactic, never ideological, nor coercive. In his final chapter, the author asks whether, in a fragmented, trivialized, and unidimensional society, Christian art is possible, to which he responds absolutely in the affirmative. One might ask whether a history of Christian (or any sectarian) art and architecture is possible. Such a category suggests that Christian art was designed to reveal and to teach the narratives and doctrine of a society absent any dialogue, persuasive or aggressive , with those members outside the Christian faithful, and those dissidents within. Barbara Abou-El-Haj State University ofNew York at Binghamton Gendered Missions: Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice. Edited by Mary Taylor Huber and Nancy C. Lutkehaus. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1999. Pp. x, 252. $47.50.) This is a collection of essays by seven authors which explore gender issues— i.e., not only the roles of women in missionary societies and missionary work, but also the way in which these roles were shaped and developed by their interaction with men and male institutions—in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century missions. It describes the diverse ways in which these issues were approached in a variety of religious traditions: English Anglicans, Dutch Reformed missionaries from the Netherlands, Swiss Pietists, Norwegian Lutherans , and Roman Catholics with German roots. The authors also examine how they were encountered in different parts of the world—Europe, Africa, the South Pacific, and Indonesia. The distinctive contribution of these articles is twofold: they take the testimony of women seriously and present it carefully; and they examine the consequences for women of a patriarchal system in missionary structures in a dispassionate way. It is a serious study by scholars who are attempting to recover the often untold story of the contribution of women and of the difficulties they encountered in a service dominated by men. The book is well presented. Photos that illuminate the text are included. There are endnotes for each chapter that are rich in bibliographical references. The index is well prepared . The book may well have profited from more diligent editing; there is unnecessary overlap and repetition. The editors allowed the author(s) of each article to append a rather long bibliography to each essay. This may be useful for the reader who is interested in just one particular essay; but overall there is BOOK REVIEWS305 a large number of titles that are repeated after each essay, and this seems rather useless. The historian-reader may grow impatient with some of the analysis offered since because of the background of the authors it has an anthropological and sociological focus. However, these are sources and materials which must be taken seriously by the historian, since so much of mission history has been male-dominated in terms of content and interpretation. This book focuses on the period of high imperialism (1870-1914) and raises issues that mission historians of this period must keep in mind: e.g.,what freedom did the missionary movement give to women in terms of independence and professional development ? what forms of leadership in this movement were taken up and practised by women? what limitations were placed on women by the roles imposed on them by their culture in a male-controlled missionary society? what restrictions were placed on women by the colonial enterprise within whose framework the missionary movement developed because they were supposed to bring "Christianity and civilization" as it was experienced in the imperial countries? These are not questions that a mission historian might initially address; but they are issues that must be considered through one's own research or through the research of others. Mission historians will meet new material in this book carefully and creatively presented and therefore it will be of great value...