Missionaries and female empowerment in colonial Uganda: New evidence from Protestant marriage registers, 1880–1945

Abstract

Protestant missionaries have recently been praised for their comparatively benign features concerning their support of women's education in Africa. Using a novel dataset of 5,202 Protestant brides born between 1880 and 1945 from urban and rural Uganda, this paper offers a first pass at analysing empirically the role of mission education on African women's socio-economic position within the household. The paper finds that although mission education raised the sampled brides' literacy skills way above female national levels, they were largely excluded from participating in the colonial wage labour market. In this context, the missionary society presented an almost exclusive source of female wage labour in areas of religious service, schooling and medical care. While literacy per se did not affect women's marriage behaviour, women who worked for the missionaries married significantly later in life and married men closer to their own age, signalling a shift in the power balance between parents and daughters and between husband and wife. On average, daughters of fathers deeply entrenched in the missionary movement had the highest chances to access wage employment, emphasizing the importance of paternal mission networks for Protestant women's work outside the household during colonial times.

Occupational Mobility during South Africa's Industrial Take‐Off

“…Although we can only speculate about what caused the mobility of white males, the discriminatory and repressive policies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seem a plausible possibility to explore. To do this, future research must turn to new individual‐level historical data sources such as the Anglican marriage records used by Meier zu Selhausen () for Uganda. Although such sources do not escape issues of selection bias, they do offer a window into population groups that were often neglected in official colonial documents (Fourie, ).…”

“…Occupations were also coded into the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (Van Leeuwen et al ., ) and then classified according to the Historical International Social Class Scheme (HISCLASS) (Van Leeuwen and Maas, ). Although this classification was initially developed for Europe, it has been applied in other colonial settings as well (Meier zu Selhausen, ; Meier zu Selhausen et al ., ). The twelve HISCLASS groups were re‐categorized into five broad skill classes: professionals, skilled and semi‐skilled workers, medium skilled workers, farmers and fishermen and low and unskilled workers.…”

Measuring rural welfare in colonial Africa: did Uganda's smallholders thrive?

“…Allen, ‘Restatement’, p. 7. Meier zu Selhausen, ‘Missionaries and female empowerment’, p. 90, indeed finds that, during the colonial era, more than half of all Protestant women in his Kampala sample reported textile‐related activities. The contribution of these activities to household income is likely to have been modest; Kyomuhendo and McIntosh, Women , pp.…”

“…Meier zu Selhausen, ‘Missionaries and female empowerment’; Meier zu Selhausen and Weisdorf, ‘Colonial legacy’; Meier zu Selhausen, van Leeuwen, and Weisdorf, ‘Social mobility’.…”

“…Kyomuhendo and McIntosh, Women , pp. 44–115; Meier zu Selhausen, ‘Missionaries and female empowerment’.…”