Zenana Mission  an evangelical movement conceived and organised in Britain with the objective of proselytizing the Bengalis and Indians. The imperial design was to win over the womenfolk culturally, and finally religiously, by giving them western education at home. It was planned that women missionary teachers ought to visit the 'native' zenana and give them vernacular and English education so as to enable them to question the validity of heathen belief and social practices.

The Zenana Mission was first formed in 1852 by a woman missionary, Mrs. Mary Jane Kinnaird, with the support of Indian government. The mission resolved to send women missionaries to India for proselytizing the female population of India. It maintained affiliation with the Church Missionary Society (founded in 1799). In 1864 they came to be known as the Indian Female Normal and Instruction Society. In 1880 the Zenana Mission in England added medical work to its ministry and became Zenana Bible & Medical Mission.

The effort of the Christian missionaries in the field of female education in Bengal preceded government action in that direction by decades. As girls dropped out of school because of marriage at an early age, and upper class Hindu and Muslim girls seldom ventured outside the zenana to attend the schools established by the missionaries, they devised the unconventional method of going from zenana to zenana to teach in an attempt to gain access to the upper class women. The missionaries termed it zenana education.

Zenana education complemented government and private efforts to spread female education and enjoyed government patronage in the form of grants-in-aid. The pioneering work of the Zenana Mission in Bengal prompted almost all Christian missionaries of various denominations to take up zenana education in their pursuit of conversion, thus increasing demand for women missionaries in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the 20th century there were about forty such mission organisations working in India.

The other Societies engaged in proselytizing the women of Bengal through imparting education were: Society for Promoting Female Education in the East, established in 1834; Ladies' Society for Female Education, Free Church of Scotland, established in 1837; Women's Union Missionary Society, established in 1861; Baptist Female Missionary Society, established in 1870; L.M.S. Ladies' Committee for Missions in India and China, established in 1875; Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, established in 1880. The missionaries failed to achieve their goal. Few women could be converted by giving them education. They continued uninfluenced by the zenana education. The government recognised the futility of zenana education tours and abolished the system in 1933. [Asha Islam Nayeem]