ABSTRACT
The invisibility of women in history, scripture, anthropology and other literary sources and academic disciplines has become a commonplace, and recent publications, especially from the 1970s onwards, have attempted to rectify this situation. The dual approach to women as missionaries and the effects of missionary activity upon women, with contributors from both the traditional mission-sending, as well as mission-receiving countries, enables people to draw parallels between Western attitudes to women as missionaries and the attitude of missionaries towards women in the cultures in which they worked. Opportunities for worthwhile careers were limited for middle-class women in Victorian Britain. Marriage and motherhood or genteel but poverty-stricken and indolent spinsterhood were the options open to many women. Protestant missionary societies argued about the desirability of sending out women to ‘heathen lands’, whether as single women or as wives of male missionaries.
