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BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
personally I shrink from advocating the sending out to Africa of young 
unmarried women. It is far better they should go there, or live there, as 
wives. Even in marriage, however, it is not right to conceal the fact that 
there are drawbacks to the healthy happy life of the married white woman 
in a barbarous country, with a sickly and tropical climate. A blithe pretty 
girl from one of the three countries which form the United Kingdom, with 
the wild rose bloom on her cheek, arrives in Africa and espouses her missionary 
husband ; or, it may be, that they are married in England, and make the 
voyage out their honeymoon. Everything in her new life is a shock to her 
mental and physical system. The unvarying, enervating heat and the enforced 
changes in her mode of dress; the strange tropical nature, overpowering at 
first sight with its luxuriance and its amazing growths ; the different kind of 
food, and even the altered manner of passing the hours of daylight; sometimes, 
too, the total absence of any kindred society of her own sex—all these new 
experiences, united, form a complete reversal of her previous life, and must at 
first react on her physical organisation. Then, too, think of a modest girl 
who has been hitherto shielded with such jealous care from contact with 
anything coarse or impure, so that she has. in fact, grown up stupidly innocent: 
think of her suddenly thrust into a barbarous country where the natives are 
naked and not ashamed, and where the conventions of decency are often 
unknowingly transgressed by them in a way which to her English prudery 
must appear very indecent; where, too, the women among whom she has come 
to minister, will, when she understands their language, talk glibly to her of 
matters that the most depraved of her sex at home would hesitate to mention 
to a young and inexperienced woman. The effect of this ordeal even on a 
young wife is not without its risks of moral deterioration, and is sometimes 
only acquired at the cost of a certain loss of delicacy. 1 This rude contact 
with coarse animal natures and their unrestrained display of animal instincts 
tends imperceptibly to blunt a modest woman’s susceptibilities, and even, in 
time, to tinge her own thoughts and language with an unintentional coarseness. 
Every year, however, makes it easier for married women to share the lot of 
their husbands in countries like British Central Africa, where civilisation is 
rapidly increasing and numbers are multiplying. The missionary societies 
working here early recognised that it was their bounden duty to supply medical 
missionaries to attend to the health of their European agents as- well as to the 
medical wants of the natives. In consequence of this the missionaries’ wives 
who have children have not suffered as has been the case in earlier days in 
other parts of Africa. Children are frequently born to the married missionaries, 
and are reared in the African climate with fair success, and eventually grow up 
healthy boys and girls in England. Every year makes it easier for the 
missionary to support his wife in Africa with reasonable comfort and chance 
of good health. Women, indeed, seem to stand the climate better than men. 
Moreover, nowadays, our ideas on the subject of women are widening ; we are 
coming to see that many burdens hitherto borne by the male can be equally 
supported by the female. On the whole, I think women make better mission¬ 
aries than men, and are always much more lovable in that aspect. Let them, 
therefore, continue to go out to Africa as celibates if they are over thirty-five, 
but otherwise as married women. 
If the supposititious traveller, whose hypothetical experiences in one type of 
1 I am writing of course of the average woman, not of exceptional characters who can walk 
through any amount of mire and come out unsoiled. 
