Throughout the age of Western colonial expansion, Christian missionaries were important participants in the encounter between the West and peoples throughout the rest of the world. Mission schools, health services, and other cultural technologies helped secure Western colonialism, and in some cases transformed or even undermined colonialism's effect. The very breadth of missionaries's focus, however, made the involvement of women in missionary work both possible and necessary.
Missionary groups thus faced more immediately the destabilizing challenges that colonial experience posed to their own ways of organizing relations between women and men. Examining the changing prospects for professional women in the missions, the contributors to Gendered Missions ask how these shaped, and were shaped by, crucial practical, political, and religious developments at home and abroad. While the focus is on the tumultuous period that historian Eric Hobsbawm calls "The Age of Empire" (1875-1914), attention also is paid to how gender has been debated in later colonial and post-colonial missions.
Scholars from any field concerned with colonial and postcolonial societies or with gender and women's history should find this book of special interest. In addition, Gendered Missions should appeal to readers in church history, mission studies, and the sociology of religion.
Mary Taylor Huber is Senior Scholar, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Nancy C. Lutkehaus is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Southern California.

Winner of the 2016 Lavinia Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing

 Awarded first place in the 2016 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award in the History and Public Policy category

The most dramatic growth of Christianity in the late twentieth century has occurred in Africa, where Catholic missions have played major roles. But these missions did more than simply convert Africans. Catholic sisters became heavily involved in the Church’s health services and eventually in relief and social justice efforts. In Into Africa, Barbra Mann Wall offers a transnational history that reveals how Catholic medical and nursing sisters established relationships between local and international groups, sparking an exchange of ideas that crossed national, religious, gender, and political boundaries.
 
Both a nurse and a historian, Wall explores this intersection of religion, medicine, gender, race, and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the years following World War II, a period when European colonial rule was ending and Africans were building new governments, health care institutions, and education systems. She focuses specifically on hospitals, clinics, and schools of nursing in Ghana and Uganda run by the Medical Mission Sisters of Philadelphia; in Nigeria and Uganda by the Irish Medical Missionaries of Mary; in Tanzania by the Maryknoll Sisters of New York; and in Nigeria by a local Nigerian congregation. Wall shows how, although initially somewhat ethnocentric, the sisters gradually developed a deeper understanding of the diverse populations they served. In the process, their medical and nursing work intersected with critical social, political, and cultural debates that continue in Africa today: debates about the role of women in their local societies, the relationship of women to the nursing and medical professions and to the Catholic Church, the obligations countries have to provide care for their citizens, and the role of women in human rights.
 
A groundbreaking contribution to the study of globalization and medicine, Into Africa highlights the importance of transnational partnerships, using the stories of these nuns to enhance the understanding of medical mission work and global change.

One of the Chinese American Librarians Association’s Ten Best Books of 2010

During the infamous “Rape of Nanking,” a brutal military occupation of Nanking, China, that began on December 13, 1937, it is estimated that Japanese soldiers killed between 200,000 and 300,000 Chinese and raped between 20,000 and 80,000 women. To shelter civilian refugees, a group of Westerners established a Nanking Safety Zone. Among these humanitarians was Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary and acting president of Ginling College. She and Tsen Shui-fang, her Chinese assistant and a trained nurse, turned the college into a refugee camp, which protected more than 10,000 women and children during the height of the ordeal. The Undaunted Women of Nanking juxtaposes day-by-day the exhausted and terrified women’s wartime diaries, providing vital eyewitness accounts of the Rape of Nanking and a unique focus on the Ginling refugee camp and the sufferings of women and children. Vautrin's diary reveals the humanity and courage of a female missionary in a time of terror. Tsen Shui-fang’s diary, never before published in English and translated here for the first time, is the only known daily account by a Chinese national written during the crisis and not retrospectively. As such, it records a unique perspective: that of a woman grappling with feelings of anger, sorrow, and compassion as she witnesses the atrocities being committed in her war-torn country.

Editors Hua-ling Hu and Zhang Lian-hong have added many informative annotations to the diary entries from sources including the proceedings of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial of 1946, Vautrin’s correspondence, John Rabe’s diary, and other historical documents. Also included are biographical sketches of the two women, a note on the diaries, and information about the aftermath of the tragedy, as well as maps and photos—some of which appear in print in this book for the first time.

For more than half a century, Virginia E. Walker Broughton (1856–1934) worked tirelessly to uplift black communities, and especially black women, throughout Tennessee. Born into an elite African American family in Nashville, she began her professional career as a teacher and later became one of the most prominent domestic missionaries in the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., as well as an accomplished speaker and writer. This annotated collection is the first scholarly work devoted entirely to Broughton’s life and writings.

The book for which Broughton is best known, Twenty Year’s [sic] Experience of a Missionary, was an autobiography first published in 1907 and reprinted in 1988 as part of a scholarly edition of spiritual narratives by black women. Recently, in the archives of Fisk University, Broughton’s alma mater, Tomeiko Ashford Carter discovered an earlier autobiographical work, A Brief Sketch of the Life and Labors of Mrs. V. W. Broughton, Bible Band Missionary, for Middle and West Tennessee, which was distributed at the famous Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895. While both autobiographies portray Broughton as an important religious figure for whom missionary work became a saving grace, Life and Labors is more revealing of key facts about Broughton and her family, and it situates them more clearly among the nation’s black elite. This volume not only brings Life and Labors back into print but also collects various other pieces Broughton produced during her long career.

Among those other writings is a 1904 booklet titled Woman’s Work: As Gleaned from the Women of the Bible, and the Bible Women of Modern Times, which recognizes the prominence of the female in Christian theology and shows how Broughton anticipated the work of present-day feminist and womanist theologians. Several “training course” articles that Broughton wrote for a National Baptist newspaper, covering such topics as the Christian deportment of women and the need for black spiritual literature, are also gathered here, as are a program she devised for systematic Bible study and a brief article, published just a few years before her death, in which she describes some of her missionary field work. Complementing these primary materials are an extensive critical introduction and notes by Carter, a Walker-Broughton family tree, and a chronology of Broughton’s life.

As this collection makes clear, Virginia Broughton was strongly committed to making the work of black religious women an ongoing intellectual enterprise. In these pages, she emerges as both a dedicated missionary and a formidable religious scholar.