Gender, Colonialism, and Faith

One of the most fruitful departures in scholarship on European colonialism has been an explosion of work on gender. An important subset of this work has focused on religion and, more particularly, on gender and the history of missions and mission Christianity. Despite the limitations of an institutional focus on missions, examining how gender operates within them is a useful approach to questions about how colonialism affected daily life and how daily life became a site for gendered power struggles. It also raises questions about how particular views of gender were reworked and disputed in the quest to justify or contest colonialism.

This essay examines work on religion, gender, and colonialism in the hope of drawing out some common themes and points of tension with particular attention to works on mission and Christianity. The studies range from Jon Sensbach’s sensitive portrayal of a black Moravian missionary working her way around the eighteenth-century Atlantic world; to Salma Ahmed Nageeb’s compelling examination of how women in the contemporary Sudan negotiate social spaces; Eliza Kent’s multi-faceted analysis of Christianity in nineteenth century South India; and Dorothy Hodgson’s engaging account of Catholicism among Maasai women in twentieth century Tanzania. Sonya Grypma examines Canadian nurses in China from the late nineteenth century to the revolution, while Barbara O. Reyes looks at the lives of three women on Catholic mission stations in colonial California. Finally, the e-publication co-edited by Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew Brown-May derives from an Australian conference that brought together scholars exploring the relationship of missions to colonialism, with particular attention to gender relations.

Most of these books focus on gender, missions, and the politics of conversion, although there are a couple of outliers. For example, Nageeb’s study of women and Islamization in the Sudan provides a useful point of comparison. Although Nageeb examines Islam rather than Christianity, her interest in the ways individual women navigate state Islamization programs parallels Hodgson’s and Kent’s accounts of local reactions to Christianization programs. In each of these three cases, reforming gender roles lies (or lay) at the heart of religious reform. The second apparent outlier is Grypma’s work on Canadian missionary nurses in China, for whether or not this medical mission was an instrument of colonialism is an unresolved question throughout the book. This, however, raises useful questions about what “counts” as colonialism, a question at the heart of recent work on “cultural colonialism.”

All of these studies point to the importance of a gendered account of religious experience, especially with regard to conversion. The theme of religion and power occupies center stage in all of the books, as does the topic of women’s struggles to exploit ambiguities in religious language to negotiate better positions for themselves. Yet each author takes seriously the importance of religious belief and therefore refuses to see religion as merely a reflection of material power. This is...