| Summary: | Based on a corpus of missionary postcards dating from the 1920s and 1930s and devoted to West Africa, this article aims to analyze the transmission of a certain conception of women's work in the colonial missionary context. The women at work, in this article, are therefore both missionary women and African women, because work is precisely what brings them together in images, or even in their experience of femininity. In addition to their mission of evangelization, an essential part of the activity of the nuns was to transmit a body of knowledge and know-how in manual work, domestic work and medical or obstetric care. The nuns thus contributed to the diffusion of a conception of femininity articulating the figure of the good Christian, the good wife and the good mother, and of the social gender relations. The large circulation of missionary postcards in the inter-war period also made it necessary to detail the visual strategies of missionary enterprises and the role played by the images of women's work in this propaganda. The studied corpus underlines the ambivalence of missionary encounters, between emancipation and domination.
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