Elizabeth E. Prevost . The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole . New York: Oxford University Press. 2010. Pp. x, 312. $120.00.

Abstract

In 1874, the “Ladies' Association” of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), a High Church Anglican mission, sent a woman named Emily Lawrence to Madagascar. In 1895, the Church Missionary Society (CMS), a Low Church Anglican mission, sent five British women to Uganda. Drawing on a wealth of letters and other records from mission archives, Elizabeth E. Prevost connects these stories. She succeeds in showing how professional, single, British women missionaries initiated schools and other social enterprises that incorporated Malagasy and Ugandan women into an Anglican “communion” that nevertheless was—and remained—fractious. Above all, this book sets out to consider “the impact of the mission encounter on British women, and … the role of missionaries and mission Christianity in forging a global Christian feminist movement” (p. 22). Yet while British Anglican women missionaries may have aspired to the promotion of “spiritual sorority” (p. 288), they manifested what Prevost calls their “missionary feminism” (p. 2) in quite different ways, as their experiences in Uganda, Madagascar, and Britain show. Moreover, like all missionaries of this period, they found themselves forced to revise goals and attitudes in light of local cultural values and the political circumstances of their imperial age.