ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the influence of the biography of Ann Judson by exploring how her story was retold in tracts and collective biographies by women biographers and editors throughout the nineteenth century. It argues that the RTS and religious writers such as Clara Balfour and the Sunday school writer Margaret Grierson used adaptation and abridgement to emphasise Ann Judson’s domestic and feminine characteristics, in effect creating an ideal missionary femininity as part of a wider movement in evangelical culture to gender Christianity and missionary martyrdom. Meanwhile, other missionary writers, such as Jemima Thompson, continued to problematise the more feminine aspects of women’s missionary experience, such as marriage and self-sacrificial death, which they saw as limiting women’s potential for active missionary work. The chapter also analyses the newsletter of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society’s Ladies’ Committee, to demonstrate how rhetorical tropes from religious life writing were useful for women missionaries’ self-presentation. The letters of Methodist missionary wives, written as the society was recruiting unmarried women missionaries to teach in mission schools, show them deploying the rhetoric of missionary femininity for these new missionaries – and for native converts – while preserving for themselves opportunities for authority and heroism.
