To Go or Not to Go? To support my husband in his life's work in a country far away? Or to stay in our own country to care for our children? This was the dilemma facing many twentieth century Congo missionaries who were both wives and mothers. There would usually be little choice as to their decision. A wife was expected, and she herself expected, to support her husband wherever his career or vocation took him. Missionaries' own children would generally have to be found alternative homes or be sent to boarding school. The mothers would not only have to endure the consequent family separation...

Lady Winifred Chesterman, wife of the renowned missionary doctor, Sir Clement Chesterman, was in her own right a superb Froebel-trained infant teacher and a highly respected missionary to the people of Yakusu, in what was then the Belgian Congo. From 1920 until 1936 Winifred loved, taught and mothered hundreds of Congolese children. Yet she also had five children of her own, five children who were always central to her heart, and for whom after 1936 she would successfully build a happy united family. Here Hazel Phillips, Winifred's fifth and youngest child, writes of what she knows of her...