On February 5, 1812, Ann Hasseltine married a young missionary named Adoniram Judson. Two weeks later, they set sail for India, en route to becoming the first Protestant missionaries to Burma. Their years in Burma were demanded incredible faithfulness and tenacity. This is Ann's story.

The role of women in the church has long been a contentious topic for Christians. In this groundbreaking study, Dr. Anna Sui Hluan critically examines the understanding of “silence” within the Myanmar context, specically as it impacts the church’s interpretation of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. She oers a comparative study of the Judson Burmese Bible alongside versions of the Greek text, exploring the role of translation in reinforcing cultural assumptions and codifying the translator’s interpretive viewpoint. Analyzing the verses in question through the lens of three contemporary schools of interpretation – literal traditional, feminist, and egalitarian – she demonstrates the need for developing a satisfactory contextual hermeneutic for interpreting passages that concern women in Myanmar today. This interdisciplinary study combines cultural and linguistic awareness, a critical analysis of hermeneutics, and a deep commitment to Scripture as the foundation for faith and life. Dr. Hluan oers the church a model of “believing criticism,” equipping believers to take responsibility for their own interpretations of Scripture and its application in their societies. This is a powerful resource for translators, scholars, church leaders, and all those seeking to faithfully apply the Bible in their contexts.

Lisa Joy Pruitt offers a new look at women's involvement in the mission movement, with a welcome focus on the often overlooked antebellum era. Most scholars have argued that the emergence of women as a dominant force in American Protestant missions in the late nineteenth-century was an outgrowth of nascent feminist activism in the various denominations. This new contribution suggests that the feminization of the later mission movement actually stemmed in large part from images of the "degraded Oriental woman" that popular evangelical literature had been circulating since the 1790s, and that the increasing focus on and involvement of women was supported by male denominational leaders as an important strategy for reaching the world with the Christian gospel. In the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth-centuries, popular evangelical literature began circulating descriptions of women of the "Orient" designed to illustrate the need of those women for the Christian gospel. Such powerful and widely disseminated images demonstrated to young American women their relatively privileged position in society and, throughout the nineteenth-century, led many to support the cause of missions with their money and sometimes their lives. A belief in the desperate need of "Oriental" women for salvation and social uplift was largely responsible for feminizing the American Protestant foreign mission movement. "A Looking-Glass for Ladies": American Protestant Women and the Orient in the Nineteenth Century traces the creation and dissemination of images of women who lived in that part of the world known to nineteenth-century Westerners as the "Orient." It examines the emotional power of those images tocreate sympathy in American women for their "sisters" in Asia. That sympathy catalyzed many evangelical women and men to argue for vocational roles for women, both married and single, in the mission movement. The book demonstrates the ways in which assumptions about the condition and needs of "Oriental" women shaped American evangelical women's self perceptions, as well as the evangelizing strategies of the missionaries and their sending agencies.