Writing to the Foreign Secretary of the London Missionary Society in 1884, John Hewlett, one of the senior male missionaries in the United Provinces of north India, described his female co-worker as ‘a lady of much ability and intelligence’. However, his assertion that she was sure to become a good missionary was qualified with the caveat ‘provided she is under the influence of wise and devoted and spiritually minded colleagues’. In its entirety, this statement neatly encapsulates the experiences of British women who became professional missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hewlett's description of his colleague illustrates the ambiguities of her position. While he expressed an appreciation for her intelligence and ability, she remained for him a ‘lady’. On one hand, this was a compliment and denoted that she had developed qualities that might be considered valuable. On the other, the designation relegated her to a position subordinate to that of her male colleagues under whose guidance she was being counselled to remain. This is most clearly shown by the fact that it is the senior male who is discussing his junior female counterpart. This situation is repeated again and again in the mission record. The differences in gender, age, training, and experience being carefully negotiated by these two colleagues were not only replicated throughout British Protestant missions but throughout wider British society as well.

This study examines the role gender played in the professional development of British Protestant missions between 1865, when Hudson Taylor began his recruitment of lay men and women to evangelise the interior of China, and 1910, when, at the Edinburgh Missionary Conference, guidelines for the recruitment and training of women candidates were presented to an international mission audience. It examines how gendered notions of women's roles in religion and society not only shaped the recruitment of female mission personnel but also contributed to the creation of a specific mission rhetoric, ‘women's work for women’. Albeit indirectly, these in turn influenced the direction to which mission work turned in the twentieth century. Women played a central role in conflating the professional and the private in mission practice.