Ruth, Miss Mackintosh, and Ada and Rose Marris: Biblewomen, zenana workers and missionaries in nineteenth‐century British missions to North India

Abstract

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, locally‐hired women were the front‐line workers in both the London Missionary Society stations in North India and the Scots Presbyterian mission to the Eastern Himalayas. However, throughout this period their roles remained sharply demarcated from those of their British ‘colleagues’ in several respects. This article compares the criteria by which workers in both missions were employed in the field and also characterised in mission literature. While inequalities based on race stand out in the mission field, it is argued that in fact maintaining racial difference was only one part of the complex negotiations men and women joining the mission profession at the end of the nineteenth century had to engage in. As was the case in wider British society, professional identity was defined only in part through structured training, although formal education came to be of increasing importance. Being marked out as a member of the professional classes meant a heavy reliance on a variety of intangibles; race was but one of many social markers that came to denote degrees of respectability. Distinctive personalised naming practices and job titles in published mission literature help illustrate how relevant social distinctions among different categories of workers might be subtly signalled to the reader.