Female faith and the politics of the personal: Five mission encounters in twentieth-century South Africa

This article explores female religious interaction in racially divided 'col onial' South Africa through the lives of five unmarried Anglican women miss ionaries who worked in and around Johannesburg between 1907 and 1960. It pa rticularly analyses the quality of their personal relationships with Africa n women converts, colleagues and students. Deaconess Julia Gilpin, in the imperial, anglicizing post-Boer War years, e ncouraged devout, respectable wifehood on the mine compounds, contributing to the corporate solidarity of praying mothers as a deeply entrenched featu re of most black churches. Dora Earthy interacted in a warmer, more egalita rian way with black churchwomen. Her transfer to Mozambique led not only to evangelistic building on African cultural traditions and pioneering anthro pological research but also to the protection and validation of Christian w idows' autonomy against coerced remarriage. Frances Chilton and Dorothy Maud, despite sharply contrasting class origins , struggled to connect with more assertive networks of married women in the segregationist 1920s and 1930s, devoting their energies rather to guiding and enhancing African girlhood and youth. Hannah Stanton, in the more polit ically fraught 1950s, recognized the necessary independence of African acto rs and the limitations of outdated white liberal advocacy. Her training of African women promised new theological and organizational maturity, a poten tial collegiality, cut short by her detention in the 1960 State of Emergenc y and subsequent expulsion. The historical sweep of this survey suggests which personal and political c onjunctures opened up or closed down meaningful interaction between coloniz ed and colonizing women. It also offers a more positive evaluation of the i ntersection of race and religion as not invariably a 'fatal combination'. T he politics of the personal in women's joint educational, mission and socia l welfare ventures across the racial divide helped keep alive the idea of a single society and thus aided the surprisingly peaceful transition to demo cracy in South Africa in 1994.