N 1860, the evangelical writer Maria Louisa Charlesworth wrote in support of British foreign missions to women in India:
The claim before us is, that we emancipate millions of captive women. Yet the work of emancipation is not, alone, the work of women. Havelock did not think it was—when he died in victory for captive women and children.... And shall any say that there is no moral chivalry in the brothers of our land? that they are only ready, when the sword is in their hand, to endure the self-denial that alone wins victory? that when physical energy is at rest, they cannot rise to the calm home endurance of self-sacrifice, in order to achieve the liberation of countless women and children, from a captivity more hopeless and more deathlike by far than that of Lucknow.... Will not Christian men draw back the darkening veil, and prove to the women of the East that 'a BROTHER is born for adversity?''
Charlesworth's tract utilised stories from the 1857 uprisings to add pathos and force to her polemic about the need to revive the evangelical project to Indian women. By using the captivity of white women in Kanpur as an analogy for the spiritual 'captivity' of Indian women and by goading Christian men to take up spiritual arms and recreate the 'rescue' mission of Sir Henry Havelock, she was evoking a set of well-established ideas about the gendered meaning of the Indian revolt. Although Charlesworth's tract did little to challenge these assumptions, and the prose collapsed into predictable clichés about British men rescuing Indian women from behind the 'darkening veil',