The Double Invisibility of Missionary Sisters

In 1998, the historians Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda published Domesticating the Empire, a pathbreaking collection on women and gender in the French and Dutch empires. Among its fascinating essays, not a single one focuses on religious women; in fact, they are not even hinted at in the entire volume. In 2011, Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés, the major French women’s history journal, published a special issue on “Colonisations,” which included not a single article featuring women missionaries.¹ A year later, at the major international conference, “Femmes et genre en contexte colonial (XIXe–XXe siècles)” [Women and Gender in a Colonial Context (nineteenth and twentieth centuries)], held in Paris, only four papers out of sixty-six took on the subject of French women missionaries.² The fine bibliography compiled by Patricia M. E. Lorcin for this forum includes only two specific works on women missionaries—both mine.

On the missionary side of French colonial history, women get only slightly more attention. Phyllis Martin has written about the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny (Soeurs de St-Joseph de Cluny) in Congo, and J. P. Daughton and Elizabeth Foster both have chapters on women religious in their books on church and state in the colonies, although they both give more attention to men.³ In France, Philippe Delisle has looked at both male and female missionaries in the Caribbean; Yannick Essertel gives equal attention to men and women in his work on Lyonnais missionaries; and Geneviève Nemo-Lecuir has written an important biography of Anne-Marie Javouhey.⁴ Elisabeth Dufourcq’s Aventurières de Dieu, published in 1993, surveys the activity of French women missionaries from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.⁵ Yet in the volume of essays Missionnaires chrétiens published in France in 2008, not a single author focuses on women missionaries even though several take male missionaries as their subjects.⁶ The series published by Editions Karthala under the rubric “Mémoires d’Eglises” has only two volumes dedicated to a female missionary order or individual, but twenty-two focusing on male orders or individuals.⁷ Studies of the “White Fathers” (Missionnaires d’Afrique) abound, while the “White Sisters” (Soeurs missionnaires de Notre-Dame d’Afrique) have yet to find their historian.⁸ In English, of the dozen essays in In God’s Empire, a collection about French missionaries edited by Owen White and J. P. Daughton in 2012, only three discuss women missionaries.⁹

These examples suggest that the explosion of historical writing about the French empire has by and large neglected women whose imperial motivations have been primarily religious in origin; most of those individuals were Catholic nuns, founders or members of religious orders dedicated (in whole or in part) to overseas evangelization, with a small subset of French Protestant women missionaries. This invisibility is furthermore apparent in both women’s history, where the stumbling block appears to be religion, and in mission history, where the stumbling block is gender. So I think I am on safe ground by asking the question: why are missionary sisters so often invisible to both historians of imperial women and (less so) to missionary historians? And what difference does it make that they are?

The relative lack of research is not because women religious were not present in imperial spaces. Although there were only a handful of French female religious orders that engaged in missionary activity before the French Revolution, the nineteenth century saw missionary activity among women rise with the extraordinary expansion of active female orders (congrégations) in France.¹⁰ French nuns travelled to all six continents, establishing missions both inside and outside of the formal French empire. By 1900, there were more than ten thousand French women missionaries compared to just over seven thousand men. In a century that emphasized domesticity, even male clergy lauded the abilities of women missionaries to reach indigenous women and children whom Catholics increasingly saw as key to evangelization efforts. As the measures of success moved from numbers of baptisms to the provision of such Catholic services as education and health...