A Larger Way for Women

The complex nexus of race, gender, class, and domesticity recurring throughout LMS missionary texts about India established a suggestive narrative which influenced other manifestly divergent discourses. A range of political groups adopted parts of this narrative, replaying it at different cultural sites. As such, missionary discourses of cultural and racial negotiation proved to be significant in ways unlikely to have been foreseen by their evangelical authors. In conclusion to part one, I want to trace some of the ways in which missionary focus on Indian women and native gender and domesticity issues affected broader imperialist, suffragist, and Indian nationalist discourses from the 1860s onwards.

British women discovered in zenana visitation a field in which their gendered skills and attributes were especially necessary. After the 1860s, religious and professional women flocked to the newly established missions for Indian women and the ‘Ladies’ Committees' of older institutions like the LMS. Jane Haggis' doctoral study ‘Professional Ladies and Working Wives’ examines the life of the ‘Ladies’ Committee' of the LMS, established in 1875 and dissolved in 1907. Her insights into the earlier period of missionary activity are invaluable, and her analysis of this later period is both critically astute and historically detailed. She suggests that the LMS moved to establish a separate ‘Ladies’ Committee' because of the expanding opportunities for female enterprise (which were often beyond the practical capacities of the already hard-working missionary wives), in addition to the availability of candidates and the proven willingness of the public ‘at home’ to finance such efforts.