Seeking to extend existing scholarship on gender and colonialism and on women and American religion, this cross-cultural study examines the work of American missionary women in South Asia at several levels. A primary concern of the study is to historicize the interventions of these women and situate them within the dual contexts of the sending society and the receiving culture. It focuses on missionaries Isabella Thoburn and Ida Scudder, who founded some of the premier women's colleges and hospitals in British colonial India. The book also draws upon the narratives and reminiscences of South Asian women, now in their seventies, who attended such institutions in the 1940s, and whose voices texture our understanding of American women's missionary work in "Other" cultures.

Seeking to extend existing scholarship on gender and colonialism and on women and American religion, this cross-cultural study examines the work of American missionary women in South Asia at several levels. A primary concern of the study is to historicize the interventions of these women and situate them within the dual contexts of the sending society and the receiving culture. It focuses on missionaries Isabella Thoburn and Ida Scudder, who founded some of the premier women's colleges and hospitals in British colonial India. The book also draws upon the narratives and reminiscences of South Asian women, now in their seventies, who attended such institutions in the 1940s, and whose voices texture our understanding of American women's missionary work in "Other" cultures.

Constructing Opportunity: American Women Educators in Early Meiji Japan tells the story of Margaret Clark Griffis and Dora E. Schoonmaker, two extraordinary women who transcended the traditional boundaries of nation, class, and gender by living and working in an alternative cultural setting outside the United States in the 1870s. Author Elizabeth K. Eder draws on numerous primary sources, including unpublished diaries and letters, to give both an intimate biographical account of these women's lives and an examination of the social and institutional frameworks of their professional lives in Japan.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, native women preachers served and led nascent Protestant churches in much of Southern India, evolving their own mission theology and practices. This volume examines the impact of Telugu socio-political dynamics, such as caste, gender, and empire, on the theology and practices of the Telugu Biblewomen.

A historical analysis of a book-inspired controversy that in its dimensions rivalled Hernnstein and Murray's "The Bell Curve" and Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" and brought forth a new political collectivity in India's women.

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza describes the theoretical and liberative theological commitments that orient her pioneering biblical scholarship, including the use of critical theory, analysis of interacting social, political, economic, and religious oppressions, and promotion of a genuinely emancipatory and democratic community of equals--in academy, church, and wider society alike.