Lost in Transition: Missionary Children of the Basel Mission in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

October 2013 Dagmar Konrad, coauthor of several Swiss and German radio and TV programs on missionary women, is a visiting lecturer at universities in Jena, Dortmund, and Bremen, Germany, and in Basel, Switzerland. She is the author of Missionsbraute: Pietistinnen des 19. Jahrhunderts in der Basler Mission (Waxmann, 2001). —dagmarkonrad@yahoo.de S in 1828, the Basel Mission, one of the largest Protestant missionary societies of the nineteenth century, sent missionaries to India, Africa, and China, primarily from Wurttemberg, Germany, and from Switzerland.1 These missionaries believed their call was to be “in the service of the Lord,” and they neither planned nor expected to return home. Their wives, the so-called mission brides, also accepted this future.2 Officially, future missionaries were forbidden to have contact with women during their seven-year training period in the Mission House, and the marriage ordinances of the Basel Mission stated that missionaries could not marry until they had served in the field for two years. Marriage proposals were made from abroad, sometimes to several women in turn, who might be known to the missionary only through intermediaries or as sisters of colleagues. In line with Pietist beliefs, many women interpreted a marriage proposal from a missionary as