From African Missions to Global Sisterhood: The Mothers’ Union and Colonial Christianity, 1900–1930

Abstract

Recent studies of feminist networks in the British Empire have highlighted the difficulties of reconciling universal claims of sisterhood with competing hierarchical categories of race, class and nation. Although the discourse of ‘imperial feminism’ which emerged in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries projected womanhood as a common basis of oppression and source of empowerment, many scholars have argued that British women’s reform movements legitimized the ‘civilizing mission’ through the oppositional image of non-white and working-class woman’s degradation, by claiming that only fellow women could rescue their sisters from the Indian zenana or the East End slum.¹ Since feminists, philanthropists and missionaries could only establish their own authority outside the home by casting British womanhood against the uncivilized female ‘other’, white, middle-class women won their own emancipation at the expense of their ‘heathen’ sisters, preventing any real possibility of partnership between them. Scholars of gender and empire have thus underscored how these missions of sisterhood established a divisive legacy of British women ‘speaking for’, rather than with, non-Western women.