Visions of Friendship and Equality: Representations of African Women in Missionary Propaganda in Interwar Britain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the interwar years, British evangelical women began to promote African women as worthy of friendship and equality. These representations differed not only from Victorian images of African women, but also those popularized by interwar secular writers. This article argues that the two most prolific female missionary writers of the interwar period, Mabel Shaw and Cicely Hooper, promoted these positive images while working as educators of African women. As feminists, these evangelicals valued African women, and as adherents of fulfillment theology popularized in ecumenical missionary discourse, they admired features of African culture that they believed were divinely inspired. By the late 1920s, these missionary women generated even more favourable images of African women, as they feared Western materialism was disintegrating African home life. Thus, this article demonstrates the liminal position of missionary women tethered to audiences in Britain, Africa, and the growing ecumenical Church. It also points to the importance of the interwar years as a key period in which ideas about race, gender, and culture were being reworked. While these missionary women did not erase boundaries of difference between themselves and African women, they invited Britons to join them in building cross-cultural, cross-racial friendships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".