Of his latest article about Scottish missionaries, Paul James-Griffiths of Christian Heritage Edinburgh writes, “This week we look at the remarkable work that was pioneered by Scottish missionaries to reach women in Muslim and Hindu cultures. Male missionaries were forbidden to reach these women, so God raised up an army of women to do it.“

Millions of women in India never had the opportunity to hear the good news of Jesus Christ. Hidden away in their zenana, or women-only space, they were under the custom of purdah, meaning that they were secluded from all men, except for their own husbands and close male family members. In earlier centuries no interaction between other men and women was allowed, and this custom still exists in many cultures today. This meant that in a male-dominated society, where only men could practice as doctors, multitudes of women suffered and died without medical care. Although some ancient cultures had a form of purdah, it was Islam that particularly spread this custom in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Today we are familiar with the hijab, burqa, or niqab, which millions of Muslim women are required to wear. Such head coverings reflected the Islamic view in the Qur’an and Hadith, and wherever Islam went other cultures, such as some high caste Hindus, adopted this custom, along with purdah.

How then would it ever be possible for these cultures to be reached with the gospel? Such a desperately needy mission field could only be reached through Christian women who could bring healthcare, education, nursing and support. The problem was that almost all Protestant missionaries before the 1840s were men. It was Thomas Smith (1817-1906), a Christian maths teacher from Symington in Lanarkshire, who first publicly raised the call in 1840 for women to be trained as missionaries to visit the zenanas in India. He had been nurtured in a Christian worldview at the Divinity College in Edinburgh by Dr Thomas Chalmers, and had been inspired by fellow Scotsman, Alexander Duff in Calcutta.

At first Smith’s idea was turned down by the mission board. It would be another Scotsman, John Fordyce (1819-1902), who would be sent out to India for the prime purpose of pioneering the zenana missions in 1852, where he established the Calcutta Normal School. The Normal School model was a teacher training college that had been pioneered in Glasgow by the Scotsman David Stow in 1828, and had been developed by Sir James Philips Kay-Shuttleworth in England in 1840. Fordyce was also credited with being the person who invented the rickshaw. The vision in Calcutta was to train up national Indian Christian women who would educate their fellow women in the zenanas.

Unfortunately, Fordyce took seriously ill after a few years, and had to return to Scotland in 1856. However, this setback would actually cause the work to change hands and be run by a woman missionary called Hana Catherine Mullens (1826-1861). The zenana mission work was so effectively advanced by this Swiss-Dutch lady, that she became known as the “Apostle of the Zenanas”. By the 1880s the zenana missions and schools had grown into a national movement, with home visits, women’s hospitals and segregated wards for women in hospitals. By 1890 there were 40,513 zenana missions in the whole of India. This model, founded in India by Scotsmen, was then taken by others to Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Back home in Edinburgh, an extraordinary breakthrough had occurred. Sophia Jex-Blake and her six women friends, collectively known as “the Edinburgh Seven”, were finally allowed to train as medical doctors at the famous Edinburgh Medical College in 1869. Jex-Blake went on to found the first women’s medical college in the history of the United Kingdom in 1886 in Edinburgh, after Parliament had passed the UK Medical Act in 1876, allowing women to practice as medical doctors. Although Jex-Blake was an amazing pioneer, she was also apt to control everything, so the students reacted against her method. This led to the evangelical Christian Elsie Inglis setting up a rival school in Edinburgh, named the Medical College for Women, in 1889.

The zenana mission movement was delighted at this exciting new development, and Christian women who had qualified as doctors began to enlist as zenana missionaries, not just from Britain, but from Europe, America, and elsewhere as well. At the same time the Christian, Florence Nightingale, had been pioneering professional nursing colleges since the 1870s. Thus, an army of Christian women who had been properly trained as teachers, doctors and nurses, began to rise up and impact the lives of multitudes of women. They, in turn, would train up Indian and indigenous Christians of other nations, who would spread the work far and wide.