Ruth Alice Fisher

Ruth Alice Fisher, née Hurditch (1875–1959), sometimes referred to as Ruth B. Fisher, was a British CMS missionary to Uganda. Her Times obituarist labelled her "one of the great Victorians".

Life Ruth Hurditch was born in Marylebone in 1875, the sixth child of an evangelical missioner, C. Russell Hurditch. She helped her father organize mass meetings in Exeter Hall. In On the Borders of Pygmy Land (1904), Fisher described the women of Toro "before the advent of Christianity", in terms which are clearly freighted with gender, class and imperial expectations: quote|As they sat, day by day, huddled together in their dirty little grass homes, their conversations scarcely ever ventured outside the well-beaten track of real or imaginary sickness, and the usual revolting topics that polygamy and heathenism suggest. Modesty, reserve, shame and sensitiveness were not known among them. One's whole nature recoils from the recollections of Africa's lost womanhood.

Works On the Borders of Pygmy Land. London: Marshall brothers, 1904. Twilight Tales of the Black Baganda. London: Marshall brothers, 1911. 2nd ed., 1970, with an introduction by Merrick Posnansky.