Gender, Culture and ‘the Spiritual Empire’: the Irish Protestant female missionary experience

Abstract Focusing on the archives of Irish Protestant missionary societies, this article aims to contribute to the growing feminist literature on a female missionary subculture which provided unique opportunities for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stressing diversity of experience and highlighting some of the most relevant features of the ‘sending’ culture, consideration is given to the notion and meaning of individual empowerment in a context where spiritual and secular motivations were inextricably interwoven and where ideological tensions between researcher and researched pose problems of both representation and interpretation. Some preliminary thoughts are also offered on the complexities and ambiguities of the imperial context when emerging nationalist movements were impacting on both the ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ cultures.…