In the above passage Rev. James Long, the CMS missionary feeling offended at his wife not being treated as a ‘lady’, obviously seeks to reconstitute the customary perception of a missionary's wife. In nineteenth-century England, English missionaries who had traditionally come from the lower working class faced the same depreciatory treatment and ambiguous status as did English governesses. Within a span of 50 years, from the early 1800s when the wives of missionaries like Carey and Marshman accompanied their husbands to India, to Mrs Long, who arrived with her husband in Calcutta in 1848, the image of the wives of missionaries had drastically changed. No longer were they content to project themselves as the pecuniarily constrained, self-effacing wives who came from the lower strata of the working class to serve by the sides of their husbands. They were now ‘ladies’ by virtue of their birth, education and fortune, ‘better’ than the ‘ladies in India’. Such a modification in the image of the woman missionary was necessitated by vital changes which were occurring in Indian society as a result of the confluence of two cultures. As British missionaries made a foray into the inner sanctum of native houses, a hitherto unknown world of class, caste, domesticity and gender opened up that redefined gender and cultural roles.

As late as 1840, Mrs Wilson's schools had been mostly attended by lowcaste, poor native women. The period 1840–1860 was the beginning of a new approach by missionaries, which surprisingly took a long time to be realized, that if proselytization of Christianity in India were to be successful, it had to target caste, class and gender.