Modern Women Modernizing Men: The Changing Missions of Three Professional Women in Asia and Africa, 1902-69

During the interwar era, the world of mainstream Protestant missions was in transition. The once-dominant paradigm of separate spheres - women’s work for women - had lost its saliency, and professional women often entered work worlds largely peopled by men. Medical missionaries Belle Chone Oliver and Florence Murray, and literature specialist Margaret Wrong, were three such women. Using these women’s experiences in colonial India, Korea, and sub-Saharan Africa as case studies, Modern Women Modernizing Men explores how professionalism, religion, and feminism came together to enable missionary women to become the colleagues and mentors of Western and non-Western men. This bold and original book will be of interest to scholars engaged in gender, women’s, and postcolonial studies, as well as to readers interested in the history of the international missionary movement.