ABSTRACT
It is increasingly recognized that women were of fundamental importance in defining, developing, and shaping the course of the modern missionary movement and that women missionaries working abroad served as a catalyst that opened opportunities for women denied them in their country of origin. In Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, women were becoming more insistent on their right to education and to entry into the male professions. Women played an important part in sustaining the interdependence of family members, in families that were much larger social units than is common in Western society today. The sister who had gone out to live with a single or widowed brother often found mission work to do and stayed on even after the brother married. Those in charge of evangelism within the Churchmen's Missionary Society, even in India, were slow to realize that if women and girls were to be reached, the reaching must be done by women.
