Missionaries and the Development of a Colonial Ideology of Female Education in India

Abstract

Protestant missionaries in India developed a fully articulated ideology of female education in the 1840s. They employed a separate spheres gender construction in a colonial context, assigning to the female the leading role as the custodian of culture, thus regarding her as the key to successful proselytism and cultural transformation. This ideology was the work of male missionaries before females entered the field in large numbers, and was deeply dependent on prior Indological discourse. The ideology and its emphasis on the formation of character influenced both colonial educators and nationalist writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.