October 16 - 18, 2007 

Missionary Manhood: Professionalism, Masculinity and Belief on the 19C British Imperial Mission Field

Rhonda A. Semple

Deparment of History 

St Francis Xavier University,

Antigonish (Canada)

It is almost a truism now that the understanding of the work and impact of British imperial missions was incomplete without an analysis of the role of the ‘peri-professional’ women. A growing body of historical scholarship documents the work of the sisters, wives and daughters who laboured alongside the male missionary, both prior to and throughout the advent of the professional female mission worker. These women were central to shaping the mission project, not only through mission work given shape by their western feminine upbringing, but also through their example of Christian femininity. But what of the importance of the Christian husband and father? 

The juxtaposition of professional and private that similarly existed for the male missionary has been less well studied by mission historians. Of these, Andrew Porter’s early writing examined the relationship between personal belief and student evangelical activism in shaping individual professionals and colonial policy. Much of his subsequent work similarly rests on expectations about the importance of that interplay between private belief and practice and a public life, but the focus of much of his writing has been on the formal public life. 

This paper will focus a gendered lens on the private actions of male mission professionals, looking at men from the LMS, CofS missions and British Methodists in 19C northern India in order to better understand the ways in which their personal lives were regulated by their professed faith, and how that activity shaped their professional identity and work. An examination of the lives of missionaries in the 19C British empire is essential for several reasons. 

Previous work on empire in general and that which addresses questions of sexuality in particular has focused on the masculine imperial environment of the military, administrative, and commercial worlds. However, the 19C Protestant mission community played a central role in Empire, on the interface between communities and cultures. This evangelical culture has been characterized as muscular Christianity, yet archival evidence suggests this definition requires revision in order to include the myriad of ways in which masculinity was performed in the modern British empire

About Rhonda A. Semple

Rhonda A. Semple is assistant professor of History at St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Canada. She is author of Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission (Boydell press, 2003) and of articles on missionary women in the British Empire.

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