Jeffrey Cox, Professor of History at the University of Iowa, in an article entitled “What I have Learned from Writing The British Missionary Enterprise from 1700” (International Bulletin of Missionary Research, April 2008), distills a number of his conclusions from his study of and book on British missions. Below is a quote from the article that coincides with and reinforces a salient point Dana Robert makes in her new book (see my post of March 31).
A majority of missionaries were women. Specialists in the field know this, but I still find audiences that are surprised to hear it, largely because the image of the missionary is almost entirely male. The problem in mission historiography is to establish the role of the wives of male missionaries as missionaries in their own right, which they were from the very first days of overseas missionary effort. There is a hidden clause, however, in most generalizations about nineteenth-century missions: “not counting the wives.” That unspoken exclusion makes it difficult to count the true number of women missionaries, but it is not impossible to make plausible estimates.
Women!
Hear! Hear!