Life in Language: Mission Feminists and the Emergence of a New Protestant Subject

A new anthropology of Protestant feminism, anchored by the language experiments of one Lutheran community.

The language of the Bible is a powerful lens through which many Protestants understand themselves and their world, and its prohibitions on women’s speech pose complicated challenges to women. Nevertheless, women frequently serve as vocal leaders in Protestant organizations, including the early twentieth-century Norwegian Mission Society. In Life in Language, Ingie Hovland offers a unique biography of Henny Dons, a leader of the society’s so-called mission feminists, that grapples with ways Protestant women crafted innovative, expansive self-understandings through Christian language. More than their male peers, the mission feminists turned to religious speech to express material, as well as heavenly, desires for paid work, voting rights, and more, and Hovland argues that these experiments in women speaking, reading, writing, and listening paved the way for a new way of being in the world.

Ingie Hovland is assistant professor of religion and women’s studies at the University of Georgia and author of Mission Station Christianity: Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand, Southern Africa 1850-1890.