Recent feminist reassessments of the historiography of European colonialism have identified a gendered quality intrinsic to colonizing endeavours across a range of imperial settings (see for example Callaway 1987; Chaudhuri and Strobel 1992; Grimshaw 1989; Hunter 1984; Jolly and Macintyre 1989; Knapman 1986; Strobel 1991). In particular, these studies have revealed a cultural agenda directed at transforming the ideologies and practices of indigenous gender orders into versions of metropolitan norms. This gendered dimension of colonialism is embodied, in much of this literature, in those ‘colonizing women’ who not only provided potent symbolic images for the ‘recasting’ of indigenous women, but were significant agents in articulating and conducting a project of domestication aimed at colonized women. Through the influence of their own exemplary femininity and domesticity, white women sought to remodel indigenous women into the ‘good wives and mothers’ they themselves were assumed to personify. Missionary women, as wives and single women, are prominent in this revisionist history, reflecting the intimate connections between nineteenth-century evangelical Christianity, dominant gender ideologies and imperialism.

Interestingly, given Britain's imperial and evangelical past, it is the North American women's missionary movement which has attracted most research attention to date. In particular, the book-length studies by Jane Hunter (1984) and Patricia Grimshaw (1989) and a growing periodical literature have begun to document missionary women's involvements in proselytizing a ‘gospel of gentility’, to use Hunter's term, in an overt programme to ‘convert’ indigenous women not only to Christianity but to conventions of ‘true womanhood’ embodied in the exemplary figure of the missionary women themselves (see especially Flemming 1992; Grim- shaw 1989; Hunt 1990a, 1990b; Hunter 1984; Jolly 1991; Ramusack 1992).