This dissertation examines the daily life of women and girls at the St. Joseph Mission in Ngasobil (Senegal; 1863-1930), in an effort to better understand colonial missionization as an intimate lived historical experience, not simply part of a global process. Critically, not only was St. Joseph’s host to French missionary women and men, but it was also the hub of the first sub-Saharan order of religious sisters. These women were among the first Africans to access and commit to Catholic religious vocation, and they became an integral part of the Church’s mission to Senegambia. Their contributions to that project are the crux of my inquiry. My approach is unique in that I focus on vocation rather than solely conversion as the primary means of understanding missionization. Missionization then emerges as a collaborative effort in which Africans and Europeans were both actively and productively involved in the building of community—perhaps most especially from the point of view of women’s labors, here understood as the sisters’ ministry (that is, the outwardly visible, community-based deployment of their vocation). I identify vocation as both a diverse suite of practices and a potent analytic through which to think about Senegambian and French women involved in the missionary project. To parse vocation, this dissertation brings together archaeological, documentary, and oral archives from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the interstices of mundane and sacred practices engaged in by the women and girls of St. Joseph’s. I offer the argument that through an assemblage of seemingly non-religious practices bound up in vocation and nineteenth-century Franco-Catholic ideals of womanhood (including laundering, cooking, sewing/tailoring, teaching, nursing), the women and girls of Ngasobil forged a cohesive and vibrant Catholic community. In framing St. Joseph’s missionary project as one of community-building, the agency of Senegambian converts—particularly women and girls—is taken seriously. Viewed through the lens of vocation, their actions are not reduced to a binary of indigenous resistance against missionary (framed as colonial) hegemony, but understood as creative, productive, and invested in fostering a uniquely Senegalese Catholic community in Ngasobil, and across Senegal’s littoral regions (where the majority of Catholics still live today, despite being a small minority in Senegal, where only about 5% of the population identifies as Christian). The overall significance of this research is twofold. First, it complicates the missionary-missionized relationship (resisting a tidy dichotomy) and the place of missionization within the larger context of modern colonialism. Instead, my research illuminates the murkiness of these categories in Senegal and suggests it is more productive to think about St. Joseph’s as a place of cultivation—of Catholicism and community—arguing that the community-building aspect was foundational to the entrenchment of Catholicism as practice and belief. Second, this dissertation brings to the fore the role(s) of women in missionization, not simply as secondary support staff for male missionaries on the one hand or passive targets of evangelization on the other, but as particularly situated and creative agents in their own right. As central actors in Senegambian missionization, these women—through their labor, faith, and social (re)production—crafted a Franco-Senegalese concept of Catholicism as feminine practice and community.