Chapter 8 Foreign Missions: Jungle Pioneers and Urban Church Planters

Chapter 8

Foreign Missions: Jungle Pioneers and Urban Church Planters

The one area of church ministry above all others that captured the imaginations of women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that of foreign missions. The missionary profession offered women unparalleled opportunity for meaningful ministry. Women freely preached, evangelized, planted churches, trained nationals, established schools, and conducted humanitarian work. Their lack of clerical ordination had little effect on their ministries, and they were far out of reach of critics back home. Some would-be critics took comfort in the fact that most women missionaries were involved in “women’s work” and those who were preaching to mixed or all-male groups were not seriously breaching any Pauline injunctions anyway, since their hearers were only “natives.” So, for women who wanted a meaningful professional ministry, foreign missions provided the opportunity, though not without a struggle—a struggle that began on the home front.

Foreign missions offered far more than a meaningful Christian profession for thousands of women in the church. It was a cause—a movement that drew millions of women into its sphere. Indeed, it was “substantially larger than any of the other mass woman’s movements of the nineteenth century” and outstripped in size both the Laymen’s Missionary Movement and the Student Volunteer Movement. “By 1915 there were more than three million women on the membership rolls of some forty denominational female missionary societies.”¹

In spite of the fact that there were vast numbers of women involved in foreign missions, both at home and abroad, and that women had a powerful impact on the modern missionary movement, little mention is made of their contributions in the history-of-mission texts. “As so frequently happens in the writing of history,” Patricia Hill points out, “the women have simply disappeared.”² Kenneth Latourette’s massive seven-volume history makes very little mention of women, though four of those volumes are devoted to the modern period. Stephen Neill, likewise, virtually ignores the work of women in his classic History of Christian Missions. Robert H. Glover’s Progress of Worldwide Missions, revised and enlarged by J. Herbert Kane, makes mention of several notable women, but slights them in comparison to male missionaries. For example, Henry M. Stanley, an explorer-“missionary” to Africa, although he can hardly be considered a missionary at all, is given more coverage than Mary Slessor, who did extensive missionary pioneer work in Nigeria for nearly forty years. And David Brainerd, who spent five years in a less-than-successful attempt to evangelize the American Indians, is given more coverage than Amy Carmichael, who spent fifty years overseas in a fruitful ministry in India. Lottie Moon, a pioneer missionary to China, is not mentioned at all. An exception to this neglect of women is the recently published history-of-missions text, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya, which chronicles the contributions of both male and female missionaries throughout missions history and devotes a separate chapter to the women’s missionary movement of the modern period.³

Mission Support Societies

The first organized involvement of women in missions began in the early nineteenth century and entailed mission support societies. In 1800 Mary Webb organized the Boston Female Society for Missionary Purposes, which her biographer has termed “the first woman’s missionary society in the world.”⁴ Although her own denomination was Baptist, the group, like many that would follow, began as a nondenominational movement—in this instance made up of Baptists and Congregationalists. (In 1829 the organization split into two separate groups, each supporting its respective denomination.) For more than fifty years, this tiny woman, who was confined to a wheelchair, served as secretary-treasurer of the organization and generated support for both home and foreign missions.

Two years after Webb’s group was formed, women in Boston and all over New England rallied behind Mehitible Simpkins and formed “mite” societies, the proceeds of which went into the treasury of the Massachusetts Missionary Society. “Women were already giving their pennies for missions, and the Cent Society brought forth a flood of copper coins…It caught the feminine imagination; Mrs. Simpkins was deluged by pennies.”⁵

The early mission-support groups were welcomed by church leaders and generally were not viewed as a threat to male authority because they were organized as auxiliary societies and the disbursement of funds remained under the control of denominational or mission leaders. “By the 1820s,” writes R. Pierce Beaver, “women were generally conceded the right to organize for fund raising, for prayer, and for educating themselves and their children with respect to mission.”⁶ With the approval, and in many cases the encouragement, of men, female mission support societies flourished during the first half of the nineteenth century, as did a wide assortment of home-missionary benevolent societies.

Missionary Wives

Long before women’s support societies were officially organized, women had been actively involved in missionary work. Since the dawn of modem missions during the mideighteenth century when the Moravians, inspired by Count Nickolas von Zinzendorf, spread out across the world, they served with their husbands in a great evangelistic effort. But these women were considered merely wives of missionaries—not missionaries in their own right. So also was the case with missionary wives in the generations that followed. “Although the wife was considered indispensable, she got little official recognition. It was her husband who was appointed ‘missionary’ and handed the instructions. She was long designated only ‘assistant missionary.’”⁷

Indeed, in many instances such a woman was merely a wife—going to the mission field only because she was constrained to follow her husband. She was a participant in the unhappy saga of leaving her family and homeland behind for the sake of her husband’s ministry, living in deprivation, and dying young of childbearing. Jane Hunter cites a survey that showed “seventeen percent of the American Board women who were married when they went to the field indicated that it was for their husbands alone that they were in China. Women married long before they set sail were more likely to be in this category.”⁸ Dorothy Carey, whose lot it was to be married to William Carey, the “Father of Modern Missions,” is an example of this.

Dorothy Carey

When William Carey suddenly announced in 1792 that he had volunteered himself to the newly formed Baptist Missionary Society to go to India for the rest of his life as a missionary, Dorothy was devastated. She had three young children and was pregnant with the fourth. Although she was illiterate (as were many lower-class English women of her day), she was well aware of the privations and disease her family would face—if they were fortunate enough to survive the dangerous sea voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. She had willingly served with William in his tiny Baptist parishes and shared the family’s meager sustenance with others who were even less fortunate. But the proposition that she uproot her family and risk their lives in an unproven missionary venture for which she felt no “calling” seemed utterly absurd. She refused to go.

Nearly a century later Margaret Simpson was confronted with a similar situation when her husband (A. B. Simpson, who later founded the Christian and Missionary Alliance) shared with her his visionary call to China. As the mother of six children, she viewed the idea as preposterous, though she was careful not to discredit his call: “I was not then ready for such a sacrifice. I wrote him that it was all right—he might go to China himself—I would remain home and support and care for the children. I knew that would settle him for a while.”⁹ It did. Simpson served the cause of foreign missions on the home field, no doubt more effectively than he could have overseas.

Dorothy Carey’s refusal to go did not elicit the same reaction. William left without her, taking only Felix, their oldest son. Before he actually departed England, however, his partner was detained by creditors, and the mission was delayed several months. In the meantime, Dorothy gave birth to her fourth child and was persuaded to accompany her husband to India. Her tenure as a missionary wife is one of the tragic footnotes of missions history. From the beginning she was intensely dissatisfied with missionary life, and William complained in a letter that she did “not see the importance of the mission” and was “continually exclaiming against” him.¹⁰ And no wonder. The family situation progressively worsened. One after another, members of the family were stricken with tropical fevers or dysentery, and in the fall of 1794 five-year-old Peter died.¹¹

The strain proved to be too much for Dorothy. Following Peter’s death, little is mentioned of her, except for the occasional references to her “insanity.” In 1901 William explained the situation to his sister: “Mrs Carey is obliged to be constantly confined; she has long gotten worse and worse, but fear both of my own life and hers and the desire of the police of the place, obliged me to agree to her confinement.”¹²

Mary Morrison and Mary Livingstone

The outstanding accomplishments of William Carey are clouded by the distressing state of his marriage and family life, but he certainly was not alone among great missionaries in having a wife who was unable to cope with her lot in life. Mary Morrison, wife of Robert Morrison, a pioneer missionary to China, also suffered severe mental strain on the mission field. Robert wrote of “her feeble mind” being “much harassed,” adding that she “walks in darkness and has no light.”¹³ Mary Livingstone, wife of David Livingstone, the famous explorer-missionary to Africa, likewise succumbed to depression. Unable to endure the rigors of African exploration with little children and frequent pregnancies, Mary returned to England with the children. There “she was not only homeless and friendless but was often living on the edge of poverty in cheap lodgings,” and it was rumored she had lapsed into spiritual darkness and was drowning her misery in alcohol.¹⁴

Priscilla Studd

It was not uncommon for missionary wives, such as Mary Livingstone, to be abandoned by their husbands. Priscilla Studd is another example. As the wife of the famed British cricket player and student volunteer, C. T. Studd, she served faithfully as a missionary to China until her health was broken and the family was forced to return to England. But that did not end her husband’s missionary career. He later left her with a debilitating heart condition and set out for Africa, where he served as a missionary without her for nearly two decades until his death.¹⁵

What was the solution to this conflict between missions and marriage? William Carey’s advice was direct: “Pray be very careful what stamp missionaries’ wives are of.” Hudson Taylor also addressed the issue, and admonished potential male candidates: “It is most important that married missionaries should be double missionaries…Unless you intend your wife to be a true missionary, not merely a wife, home-maker, and friend, do not join us.”¹⁶

The Worth of Missionary Wives

Indeed there were vast numbers of missionary wives who were “true missionaries,” according to the Taylor definition. Rufus Anderson, one of the most noted mission leaders and strategists of the nineteenth century, paid high tribute to the worth of the missionary wife. He was wary of sending single women overseas, but he believed the missionary wife to be indispensable. They served as a “symbol of peace” and “often proved safeguards to their husbands”; he also believed they were a necessary personal ingredient in their husbands’ success. Beyond that, it was the duty of missionary wives to “exert much influence in the department of education,” and he cited several exemplary cases:

At the Sandwich Islands more than a dozen of the married female missionaries are regular instructors of female schools, some of which are numerously attended and by women as well as children. In Ceylon the late Mrs. Winslow exerted an admirable influence over a charity boarding-school of native females. And Mrs. Thomson who died not long since in Jerusalem, having been a successful teacher of a female seminary in this country, carried all her zeal in behalf of female education with her to Palestine, and no doubt would soon have presided over a flourishing school of females in that land, had not a mysterious Providence seen fit so early to remove her. There are now two female schools in Syria, one of Arab girls taught by a married female, the other of Druse girls on Mount Lebanon taught by the exemplary widow of a missionary not long since deceased.¹⁷

Ann Judson

The most noted of these married women was Ann Hasseltine Judson. The antithesis of Dorothy Carey, she was looked up to as a role model for all Christian young women. In the decades following her death in 1826, dozens of biographies and biographical sketches were published about her. She was the wife of Adoniram Judson, America’s highly acclaimed “first” foreign missionary, and as such she played her part well. Indeed, before she married Judson, she had committed herself to serve God, and she maintained that her decision to go to India was not determined by her love for a man—“an attachment to an earthly object.” Rather, she insisted that she was prompted by an “obligation to God…with a full conviction of its being a call…”¹⁸

Ann was sent out to be much more than a missionary’s wife. She was commissioned with the call to ministry in mind. In his farewell address, the Rev. Jonathan Allen gave her and Harriet Newell, her female colleague, a very specific charge:

It will be your business, my dear children, to teach these women, to whom your husbands can have but little or no access. Go then, and do all in your power, to enlighten their minds, and bring them to the knowledge of truth. Go, and if possible, raise their character to the dignity of rational beings, and to the rank of Christians in a Christian land. Teach them to realize that they are not an inferior race of creatures; but stand upon a par with men…¹⁹

Ann Hasseltine Judson, Missionary to Burma and Wife of Adoniram Judson From James D. Knowles, Memoirs of Mrs. Ann H. Judson (Boston: Lincoln and Edmands, 1829). Frontispiece.

As a missionary, Ann served with no lack of dedication but with the same drawbacks that confronted virtually all married women missionaries in the nineteenth century. Despite her best efforts to do translation work and conduct classes for women, she was severely hampered by illness and particularly by childbearing. Her greatest contributions to the cause of women and missions was her inspirational writing—her gripping stories of life on the mission field and the struggles she faced, particularly when her husband was confined for nearly two years in a Burmese death prison. She also wrote heartrending accounts of child marriages, female infanticide, and the trials of the Burmese women, who were kept under subjection by the “tyrannic rod” of their husbands: “The wife receives the appellation of my servant, or my dog, and is allowed to partake of what her lordly husband is pleased to give at the conclusion of his repast!”²⁰

But worse than the ill-treatment of these women was their “imbecility.” They were “taught nothing” and spent their days in “listless idleness.” It was for this cause that Ann made her appeal to women back home:

Shall we, my beloved friends, suffer minds like these to lie dormant, to wither in ignorance and delusion, to grope their way to eternal ruin, without an effort on our part, to raise, to refine, to elevate, and point to that Saviour who has died equally for them as for us?…Let us make a united effort, let us call on all, old and young, in the circle of our acquaintance, to join us in attempting to meliorate the situation, to instruct, to enlighten and save females in the Eastern world.²¹

The High Death Rate of Missionary Wives

Ann Judson served for thirteen years in Burma before she died—thirteen years more than her colleague, Harriet Newell, served. Harriet and her infant daughter died while sailing on the Isle of France before she had a chance to conduct mission work. Following Ann’s death, Adoniram Judson married twice more (as had William Carey). Both his second and third wives served courageously as missionaries, wives, and mothers, and both died prematurely from the physical strain of missionary life. Their circumstances were not unusual, and in light of that, it is no wonder that there were cries of outrage against women’s involvement in missions. When Emily, Judson’s third wife left for Burma in 1846, the Boston Evening Transcript strongly protested: “This is another case of infatuation which would almost seem to be for an untimely death. We really think there should be a law against the wholesale sacrifice of life which is continually chronicled amongst those who imagine they are ‘called’ to labor in unhealthy climes as the wives of missionaries.”²²

Despite such warnings, married women continued to flood onto the mission field. They worked alongside or independently of their husbands, they had babies, and they died young. William Dean, a missionary to China in the mid-nineteenth century, who had lost two wives himself, was convinced that missionary women died young because they too often attempted to go beyond their wifely duties and minister outside the home. “Thus attempting to do what they cannot perform, they sacrifice health and life in the vain endeavor, and what is more, neglect the duties of their sacred calling and domestic relations.” The missionary wife, he further lamented, is plagued by “the secret thought that she is not accomplishing what the public expect, though that expectation may be unreasonable, which is the worm at the root of her joys, and which withers her happiness and her health.”²³

Some missionary wives took to heart the warnings about the rigors of the mission field and went out of their way to take precautions. Lillias Underwood, who served with her husband in Korea for twenty-eight years, was warned when she sailed as a bride to the Orient in 1889 that she would return in a coffin. Despite that warning she and her husband ventured into the interior, “where no white woman had ever been.” But she was not seeking to play the role of a martyr. Indeed, so concerned about her welfare was her husband that she felt “far too much babyfied for a hardy missionary.” He arranged for her to travel in grand style.

Under a bamboo roof covered with oiled and painted paper, she sat Turkish fashion on cushions with a hotwater bottle and footmuff at her feet, and a shawl draped round the inside of the blue muslin ‘walls’ to keep out the draughts. When the front curtain was buttoned down she was out of the range of curious eyes. Four coolies alternated in carrying the chair in pairs, three miles at a time, so that the travelers were able to make thirty or more miles a day.

It was such pampering that permitted Underwood to keep up her hectic pace of evangelistic and medical work for nearly three decades. But despite her precautions, when she left the field she was “in very feeble health.”²⁴

Except in port cities and international settlements where life frequently moved at a leisurely pace, it was generally the norm for missionary wives to maintain a heavy work schedule in addition to their domestic duties. During her eleven-year marriage to Adoniram Judson, Sarah Boardman gave birth to eight children and kept up a grueling schedule of work. According to Joan Brumberg,

Maria Taylor, Wife of J. Hudson Taylor, Founder of the China Inland Mission.

this remarkable woman “had schools to superintend, Bible classes and prayer meetings to organize, and a new maternal association for educating Burmese mothers to supervise. In addition, she was doing translation work in Burmese and Talain, while learning Peguan…”²⁵

Maria and Jennie Taylor

Maria and Jennie Taylor, the two wives of J. Hudson Taylor, also distinguished themselves in their missionary endeavors. Maria was actively involved in the founding of the China Inland Mission, and on the field she took charge of mission matters when her husband was absent. She was so influential that some of the other missionaries regarded her as the “backbone of the Mission.” Indeed, it was said that her husband “never took a step without consulting her.”²⁶ Taylor’s second wife, Jennie, was even more deeply involved in the work of the mission. In 1878, when Taylor was ill in London and a famine was ravaging North China, Jennie left him and the seven children (two of her own, four of Maria’s, and an adopted daughter) and returned to China to head up the relief program. “After that, it was easier for Mr. Taylor to let other women join the front ranks, when his own wife had led the way.”²⁷

Inequality of Missionary Wives

As much as she was revered for her sacrifice and service, a missionary wife was rarely regarded her husband’s equal. She was viewed as a “weaker vessel,” whose ministry and life was sometimes cut short through ill health and childbearing. Daniel Eddy, in his book Heroines of the Missionary Enterprise, published in the mid-nineteenth century, represents this line of thinking: “Almost all the heroines who have gone forth from the churches of America, to dot heathen soil with their lowly graves, have been attended by some stronger arm than that of weak, defenseless woman.”²⁸ An example of the discrimination that the “defenseless woman” faced is the situation Dr. Ida Scudder’s mother confronted when she and her husband first made plans to go to India as missionaries. She was denied mission-board support because she was regarded a poor risk—too frail to withstand the unhealthy environment of India. She went anyway—her husband accepting the responsibility for her support. For sixty-three years she continued her ministry, outliving her husband by a quarter of a century.²⁹

“Female Missionary Agencies”

Despite their great contribution to missions, missionary wives could not do the job alone. Domestic duties continually interfered with their ministries. “They glimpsed the promise of what might be achieved in women’s work for women and children,” writes R. Pierce Beaver, “but they longed for colleagues who would have more freedom and who could devote themselves solely to such activity.”³⁰ It was in part because of the pleas for help of married women on the field that the door was opened to single women in missions.

Because of the domestic responsibilities that consumed the time of married women missionaries, single women were needed just to keep women’s work on an equal par with men’s work. But as time went on, many women argued that women’s work was the most basic and important work in missions. According to Patricia Hill, “converting women was, in their view, more important than reaching heathen men in realizing the ultimate goal of Christianizing whole cultures.” Methodist women justified their strong emphasis on women’s work on the basis that women brought enduring stability to religion: “A man’s church will last for one generation. Mothers are the conservators of religion, bringing up their children in their own faith.”³¹

It was with this view in mind that the women’s missionary movement was initiated. This was a post–Civil War movement confined largely to North America that was organized and directed by women for the purpose of sending women to the foreign field to evangelize women. The support societies had served a purpose, but were not specifically meeting the needs of women. By the eve of the Civil War these “women’s Associations were in a sad state of decline, because of the lack of central direction in education and promotion, and, one suspects, because the women had no influence in policy which their funds implemented.”³² But even as interest in support organizations waned, interest in foreign missions increased. As reports of the downtrodden lives of Asian and African women were circulated in the West, women took up the cause to ameliorate their condition through a combined religious and social effort.

The Heavenly Mission Bestowed Upon Women to Reach out to Their Sisters and Brothers in Other Lands. From Daniel C. Eddy, Daughters of the Cross: or, Woman’s Mission (Boston: Dayton and Wentworth, 1855).

According to the early twentieth-century missions historian, Edwin Bliss, women’s work began in India. He wrote:

Not merely the seclusion in the zenana, but the terrible suffering occasioned by the customs of child-marriage, the suttee, and the position of widows, made their condition almost more pitiable than that of women in Africa or China. It was for them that the first women’s societies were organized, and work for them has been from the beginning an integral part of missionary effort.³³

This effort actually began decades before the Civil War on a very limited basis, but it was not until after the war that single women in large numbers began flooding onto the mission field.

According to Bliss, the first single woman to be commissioned to serve on the foreign field was M. A. Cooke, who responded to a plea from the British and Foreign Bible Society, to establish a school in Calcutta for Hindu girls. Soon after she arrived in India, while she was still in language study, she visited a boys’ school to observe their curriculum and teaching methods. There she watched in anguish as the Indian teacher drove away a young girl who was begging to enroll at the school so that she could learn to read. The following day, Miss Cooke returned with her interpreter, and immediately gathered together fifteen girls who likewise had been denied education, and there she formed her first mission school.³⁴

David Abeel

The request for single women to enter foreign missions was made in some instances by men. Most noted of these farsighted mission strategists was the Reverend David Abeel, a missionary to China who was ordained by the Reformed Church in America. In 1834, while he was in London en route to the United States, he admonished his English acquaintances to establish a “female agency” to sponsor single women. He viewed such an innovation as the only option, considering the unresponsiveness of the existing mission boards. As a result of Abeel’s personal pleas and his published pamphlet “Appeal to Christian Ladies in Behalf of Christian Education in China and Adjacent Countries,” The Society for Promoting Female Education in the East was formed, and within a few years women were supervising schools in several locations in the Far East.³⁵ Abeel effectively stirred the emotions of his women hearers—particularly by the burning plea he brought from the Chinese women, “O bring us some female men.”³⁶

Sarah Doremus

On returning to America, Abeel presented the same message to women in his denomination, and in doing so “he found a ready and able co-worker in one of the most remarkable laywomen in the whole history of American Protestantism”—Sarah Doremus, an active member of the South Reformed Church in New York City. She was eager to organize a “female agency,” as her British cousins had done, but her dream was frustrated by Rufus Anderson, foreign secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Anderson was well known for his opposition to single women in missions, and since Doremus was actively involved in the support work of that mission, she deferred to his wishes.³⁷

Doremus continued laboring for the cause of missions, and finally, in 1860, at a time when vocal opposition was lessening, she organized the Women’s Union Missionary Society, an interdenominational mission board that functioned out of her home and under her direction until her death in 1877.³⁸ Other “female agencies” were founded in the 1860s as the needs on the foreign field were more widely published and as resistance at home decreased. One significant factor that affected the latter was the resignation of Rufus Anderson as foreign secretary for the American Board. His successor was N. G. Clark, a man who quickly established his reputation as a strong advocate of women in missions.³⁹

By 1894 there were thirty-three women’s foreign mission boards from which some one thousand women had been sponsored as teachers, doctors, evangelists, and relief workers.⁴⁰ No longer were single women faced with rejection when they selflessly offered themselves in this most difficult of vocations. They had many options in mission societies and mission fields, and they took courage in their numbers. Indeed, so many single women joined the ranks of missionaries that they began to pose a threat to men. “The flocking of women into the field in the 1880s and 1890s,” according to Jane Hunter, “led some general board officials to feel the need to remind women of their place.” An example of that was the admonition given by a Baptist mission leader in 1888:

Women’s work in the foreign field must be careful to recognize the leadership of man in ordering the affairs of the kingdom of God. We must not allow the major vote of the better sex, nor the ability and efficiency of so many of our female helpers, nor even the exceptional faculty for leadership and organization which some of them have displayed in their work, to discredit the natural and predestined headship of man in Missions, as well as in the Church of God: and “the head of woman is the man.”⁴¹

Feminism and Foreign Missions

Single women were in many instances a threat to their male counterparts on the mission field. When denominational boards began accepting single women, the women frequently worked alongside married men, and tensions sometimes arose over work assignments. This was the situation in China in which Lottie Moon found herself. She had come to China in 1873 as a Southern Baptist missionary with the intention of going “out among the millions” as an evangelist, but instead was assigned to teach in a girls’ school. Relegating women to such roles was in her view, “the greatest folly of modern missions.” “Can we wonder,” she lamented, “at the mortal weariness and disgust, the sense of wasted powers and the conviction that her life is a failure, that comes over a woman when, instead of the ever broadening activities she had planned, she finds herself tied down to the petty work of teaching a few girls.”⁴²

Lottie Moon’s dissatisfaction with the role delegated to women on the mission field was not an isolated case. Other women discovered that their assignments were not as fulfilling as they had anticipated they would be. Bishop James Thoburn, a Methodist missionary to India, pleaded with his sister Isabella to come and serve as a teacher in a girls’ school. She went, but for months after she arrived she dutifully served as his personal secretary. When she finally refused to continue, he realized the injustice of his actions. “He understood for the first time that ‘a Christian woman sent out to the field was a Christian missionary, and that her time was as precious, her work as important, and her rights as sacred as those of the more conventional missionaries of the other sex.’”⁴³

Was Isabella Thoburn a feminist in her refusal to be her brother’s secretary? There is a strong difference of opinion today as to whether the women’s missionary movement was a feminist movement. R. Pierce Beaver subtitled his book on the subject, “A History of the First Feminist Movement in North America,” and he seeks throughout that volume to prove that women’s active involvement in foreign missions was spurred on by a feminist impulse. On the other side of the issue is Elisabeth Elliot: “Today strident female voices are raised, shrilly and ad nauseam, to remind us that women are equal with men. But such a question has never even arisen in connection with the history of Christian missions. In fact, for many years, far from being excluded, women constituted the majority of foreign missionaries.”⁴⁴

Elliot assumes that because women were in the majority they never raised their voices for equality. Not only is the logic faulty, but so is the conclusion. There were many women missionaries who raised their voices for sexual equality, not the least of whom was Lottie Moon, the “patron saint of Southern Baptist missions.” “What women want who come to China,” she wrote, “is free opportunity to do the largest possible work…What women have a right to demand is perfect equality.” Again, she wrote, “Simple justice demands that women should have equal rights with men in mission meetings and in the conduct of their work.” Moon, however, did not make such statements without receiving criticism—even from her own sex. She had to deal with the Elisabeth Elliots of her own day. One Mrs. Arthur Smith, wife of a Congregational missionary, suggested that Lottie was mentally unbalanced for craving such “lawless prancing all over the mission lot.” Mrs. Smith’s idea of a proper role for the female missionary was to attend “with a quivering lip” her own children.⁴⁵

But while women missionaries such as Lottie Moon spoke out against sex discrimination, it is overstating the case, as Beaver does, to claim that the women missionary movement was a feminist movement. Indeed, Beaver’s own evidence time and again points in the opposite direction. He states that in 1860, “the women revolted and formed the first women’s board,” but his own historical data indicates that women’s boards developed only slowly after years of delay because of male opposition, and he concedes that in the South long after 1860, “churchwomen were delayed in organization, hampered in action, and restricted in developing programs because of the long-lingering opposition of men to the public appearance and action of women.”⁴⁶

From their private correspondence and published articles, it would seem that the vast majority of women missionaries were motivated by a deep sense of commitment to God far more than by any desire to attain personal recognition or power. “For feminism to have gained a foothold among the women’s missionary community,” writes Jane Hunter, “would have entailed the replacement of the underlying premise of women’s mission work, self-denial, with its opposite, self-advocacy.”⁴⁷

When female missionaries insisted on equality, it was generally in the context of ministry, for they believed they were being denied the opportunity to serve God most effectively. In their relationship with men, they were usually careful not to overstep their prescribed bounds. Mrs. Ethan Curtis assured her audience of this in a paper read at the Woman’s Board of Missions in Brooklyn in 1891: “Nowhere do we oppose man. Our first object is to be his ready and willing assistant.”⁴⁸

Even Lottie Moon accepted the prohibition against “preaching” to men. Yet she was convinced that in order to get “any tangible, visible results” she would have “in some way to reach the men of the community.” She solved the dilemma by stirring up enough interest in her women’s meetings to rouse the men’s curiosity to the point that they could not resist coming to hear. But she made it clear that her “preaching” was to the women. How could she help it if “the men crowded silently behind them and studied along with them…Even Paul would not have objected.”⁴⁹

Other women went out of their way to avoid creating any offense on account of their sex. Isabella Thoburn accepted her first invitation to speak at a Sunday service while she was on furlough, only on the condition that she be allowed to answer questions from the front row pew rather than “preaching” from behind the pulpit. After that she more readily accepted invitations to speak, but was always very cautious not to do anything that would appear inappropriate.⁵⁰ On the mission field, however, she had far greater liberties, in part because her ministry was mainly to women. In fact, she went so far as to advocate women administering baptisms and the Lord’s Supper “to the inmates of the zenanas, for one generation at least.” Such suggestions were viewed as radical, however, by most churchmen, and for the most part women of the zenanas remained unbaptized.⁵¹

In her study of nineteenth-century Presbyterian women missionaries to the American Indians, Leecy Barnett did not find any correlation between the women’s missionary movement and feminism: “In the more than 1000 letters read for this study no woman mentioned sympathy for or involvement in the women’s rights movement.” On the contrary, she found that women missionaries perceived the role of women on the mission field to be quite different from that of men. Jeannie Dickson requested men to come to help in the work at the Dakota mission: “We have some kind of work to do that women cannot do or ought not to do.” When her request was not met, she complained that she had “to take a man’s position in everything.” Other women went out of their way to dissociate themselves from feminism. Referring to herself, Sue McBeth, a single missionary working among Nez Perce Indians, wrote to her superior: “Dr. Lowrie must not think for a moment that she is what is called a ‘Women’s Rights Woman.’…She has no affinity for such. Has more ‘rights’ now than she can make good use of—and aims to try to be with God’s help a true woman.” Yet, McBeth trained and supervised Indian pastors and preached herself.⁵²

Singleness as a Way of Life

The vast majority of single Protestant missionaries who ventured forth to distant shores had no commitment to singleness. They were single for one simple reason. There were not enough male missionaries to go around. The ratio of women to men on the mission field in many areas during the early twentieth century was as high as 2:1. In many instances single women turned down marriage proposals because the suitor was not deemed suitable for or was not interested in missionary work or because his Christian ideals did not match hers.

This was true in the case of Lottie Moon, who endured depressing bouts of loneliness in China and yet turned down a marriage proposal from Crawford Toy, a Confederate army chaplain, who had courted her before she left for China while she was living at her family plantation in Virginia. Missionary life appealed to him, and marriage appealed to her, but his Christian ideals did not match hers. He was a Darwinian evolutionist, and evolution was a view Moon considered untenable and important enough to prohibit their future life together. Toy later became a professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages at Harvard University. Years later when she was questioned as to whether she had ever been in love, Moon responded: “Yes, but God had first claim on my life, and since the two conflicted, there could be no question about the result.”⁵³

While most of the single missionaries had no vow or commitment to singleness, the female agencies that sent them out did. It was a very serious matter for a single woman missionary, whose travel and support was financed by a mission committed to single women, to marry on the field. “The whole women’s missionary movement,” writes Beaver, “was built upon a celibate order of life-career missionaries maintained on a subsistence level. Women missionaries were expected to serve for life without ever getting married.” In the event that a single missionary did marry or otherwise forsake her commission during her first term, “she was required, by a signed pledge, to return her travel and outfit allowance and sometimes her salary.”⁵⁴

The closest resemblance to taking vows of celibacy among Protestant female missionaries, next to that of a signed pledge, was membership in the community known as the Sisters of the Common Life, founded by Amy Carmichael in India. Carmichael was probably the most famous single woman missionary to leave the shores of England in the modern missionary period. Her thirty-five books detailing her more than fifty years in India were widely read in Christian circles in England as well as America. She, like so many of her female colleagues, struggled with singleness. But during her early missionary service in Japan she came to terms with that struggle, as she later related:

Amy Carmichael, Missionary to India and Author of Numerous Missions Books. Courtesy of Donhavur Fellowship.

On this day many years ago I went away alone to a cave in the mountain called Arima. I had feelings of fear about the future. That was why I went there—to be alone with God. The devil kept on whispering, “It is all right now, but what about afterwards? You are going to be very lonely.” And he painted pictures of loneliness—I can see them still. And I turned to my God in a kind of desperation and said, “Lord, what can I do? How can I go on to the end?” And he said, “None of them that trust in Me shall be desolate.” That word has been with me ever since.⁵⁵

In India, Carmichael became deeply involved in children’s work, most specifically in rescuing girls from temple prostitution. She established a home and school for these children. It became known as Dohnavur Fellowship. This all-consuming ministry became her life, and the staff and children were her family. She soon became convinced that the single life was the only alternative for those in the Fellowship, and this became the basis for the Sisters of the Common Life. Women joined the association voluntarily, and they were not bound by vows; however, they were forced to leave should they ever marry. The concept worked, and by 1952 the “family” numbered nine hundred.⁵⁶

Roman Catholic Sisterhoods

The concept of celibate sisterhoods is generally associated with Roman Catholicism—though not necessarily with missions. Yet, throughout the medieval period and following, nuns had served the cause of Roman Catholic missions by establishing convents in non-Christianized areas. Indeed, nuns were encouraged to become involved in the missionary task under Boniface, the eighth-century “Apostle to Germany.” But it was not until the sixteenth century that Catholic women again became actively involved in the missionary enterprise in their own right. They sailed from Spain to Mexico, where they established convents in several areas in the New World.⁵⁷

Ursuline Nuns in Canada

In the seventeenth century Ursuline nuns from France sailed to Canada to teach Indian girls and establish convents. They were funded by the wealthy Madame de la Peltrie, who wanted to be a nun herself but stood to lose her inheritance if she did not marry according to her father’s wishes. She needed the money to finance the mission, so she publicly went through with a bogus marriage, collected her inheritance, and secured passage for the New World. She was accompanied by six Catholic sisters, including Mary of the Incarnation, a nun from the convent in Tours who had previously testified of a vision depicting the need for mission work in Canada and of a double calling from the Virgin Mary and from St. Joseph. These single women, unlike so many Protestant women of a later date, were welcomed by their male colleagues, especially the Jesuits, who were already established in Canada. They founded a large convent, and the Indian girls were taught proper womanly behavior. According to a Jesuit observer, they “reared their pupils in so chaste a horror of the other sex, that a little girl, whom a man had playfully taken by the hand, ran crying to a bowl of water to wash off the unhallowed influence.”⁵⁸

Anne-Marie Javouhey

One of the most far-reaching missionary endeavors by Roman Catholic sisters was the work involving the Sisters of St. Joseph, founded in 1805 by Anne-Marie Javouhey (1779–1851). “Roman Catholic historians attribute the first renewal of African missions in the nineteenth century to the faith and enterprise” of this remarkable woman.⁵⁹ She was born and raised in France, and at the age of nineteen she became a nun. In 1800, soon after she entered the convent, she received a visionary call to be a missionary. She later testified that she awoke from her sleep hearing voices and seeing her room strangely illuminated. She looked around and saw children from different races and cultures. In the midst of them was a nun who spoke directly to her: “These are the children God has given you. He wishes you to form a new congregation to take care of them. I am Teresa. I will be your protectress.” With those words, the vision was finished, and Javouhey was left to contemplate its implications for her future.⁶⁰

Without papal authority, but with this powerful “call,” she founded the Sisters of St. Joseph, and the first missionary nuns were commissioned to an island in the Indian Ocean. In 1822, after the sisterhood was firmly established, she herself became a missionary to Africa. There she found the work and the people much to her liking: “I love the black peoples very much. They are good simple folk. Their only malice they get from us. It would not be difficult to convince them by example. They readily imitate what they see the whites doing.”⁶¹

Javouhey was a humanitarian and an activist. Hospitals, educational institutions, and agricultural colonies were all part of her expanding ministries. The agricultural colonies were formed to help overcome the injustice she witnessed in the colonists’ treatment of blacks, and she prohibited any form of race discrimination. Likewise she was eager to establish a native clergy, and for this purpose she founded a seminary for Africans in France.

After a number of years in Africa, Javouhey returned to her homeland to administer her growing mission society. She soon had her blue—robed sisters stationed all over the world—in Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, New Foundland, Madagascar, the South Pacific, and India. She personally was responsible for overseeing the work and was referred to by a sea captain as “my most seasoned sailor.” King Louis Philippe paid her his highest tribute by saying, “She is a great man.” Yet she, like her Protestant counterparts, struggled against the male ego. This struggle erupted in the 1840s and was the most painful ordeal of her life. It was then that the bishop over her French diocese claimed authority over the Sisters of St. Joseph—his rationale being that he was her religious superior and therefore rightfully ought to control the order. She refused to turn over the leadership to him, and he retaliated by ordering her priest in Guiana to refuse her communion. “With anguish she watched her girls, her sister nuns approach the communion table from which she was excluded.” She urged her nuns to pray for the bishop, and when he died in 1851, she said with no apparent hint of sarcasm: “The good Monsignor has preceded me. This is as it should be. All honor to whom honor is due.” She died shortly after that, leaving some nine hundred nuns scattered throughout the world. The number of women in the order of the Sisters of St. Joseph have since reached as high as 3,500, and there are more than two hundred branches of this group world-wide.⁶²

Women in Pioneering and Preaching Ministries

If feminism did not prompt women to enter foreign missions, surely the desire for meaningful ministry did. Except for certain sectarian movements, western Protestantism offered women virtually nothing in the area of professional Christian ministry on the home front. Individual women such as Phoebe Palmer had distinguished themselves as laywomen in Christian circles, but their example had done little to open the door for women in career ministries. It was an age prior to the advent of multistaffed churches and parachurch ministries, and the major field of Christian ministry, the pastorate, was closed—with rare exceptions—to women.

In the view of some mission leaders, women’s work was a category all by itself. E. R. Pitman, in his late nineteenth-century volume, Lady Missionaries in Many Lands, wrote in this vein:

The Mission Field demands various classes of workers—each using different instrumentalities. Preachers, translators, teachers, native pastors, printers, catechists, and handicrafts-men—all are needed. But beside these come another class, not one whit less important, namely, Female Missionaries.⁶³

Mary Slessor

In actuality, women served in virtually every capacity that men did on the mission field. In many instances single women “manned” remote mission stations in areas where men with families were reluctant to go. It was inevitable in such situations that their ministry would encompass more clerical duties than would have been the case if male missionaries had been accessible. Mary Slessor is a prime example. She was a Scottish Presbyterian mill worker who served for thirty-eight years in the interior of Calabar (present-day Nigeria), where tropical diseases had prevented her male predecessors from establishing a foothold. She had come to Africa at the age of twenty-seven in 1876, having been influenced by the death of her hero, David Livingstone, and like him, she spent her life in pioneer missionary work. She functioned as an evangelist and circuit preacher, paving the way for male missionaries who would follow her. Indeed, “she was convinced that pioneer work was best accomplished by women, who, she believed, were less threatening to unreached tribes than men.”⁶⁴

Slessor’s life illustrates the satisfaction single women found in foreign missions. She adapted easily to the African lifestyle, caring little about fashion, hygiene, eating habits, or time schedules. Although she was often lonely, she broke a marriage engagement with a young missionary with whom she had fallen in love, because his health could not withstand the rigors of tropical Africa. Her affections were poured out to her adopted African children and those to whom she ministered, and near the end of her life she was able to say that she was “a witness to the perfect joy and satisfaction of a single life.”⁶⁵

Mary Slessor, Pioneer Missionary to Calabar, West Africa.

Malla Moe

Another pioneer missionary to Africa who conducted a wide variety of church work was Malla Moe, an American who served in South Africa for fifty-four years with the Scandinavian Alliance Mission (since renamed the Evangelical Alliance Mission), founded by Fredrik Franson, a strong supporter of women in ministry. Like other single women on the field, she conducted a ministry that would never have been permitted at home. During her second term, “Malla was…able to plunge into preaching as never before. Her pulpit was more often a stone under the great open sky than a table in a chapel. Her vestments were the same plain dresses and coats day after day, her altar the thick bush or a grass mat in a hut,” and “her sermons were simple.”

“People are tired of polished meetings and polished sermons,” she wrote home. “They are hungry. It makes no difference how simple the message if only God is in it.” When she was in charge of a meeting…and if she thought the preacher was getting dry or tiresome or long-winded, she would interrupt him…This happened at Bethel so often it was the rule rather than the exception.”⁶⁶

But she served not only as a preacher, but also more or less as a bishop. Much of her time was spent in travel, doing evangelistic work and overseeing the work of her converts. Yet, despite this active ministry in Africa, she was not permitted to speak in the state churches when she visited Norway on her furlough. Officials of the church “reminded her to read Paul’s instruction that ‘women should keep silence in the church.’”⁶⁷

The treatment accorded Malla Moe was typical. Despite their wide-ranging ministries on the field, single women missionaries faced strong opposition when they returned home to share their experiences in the churches. This attitude toward them may have been due in part to the increasing power the women’s missionary movement attained during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. Many men feared that women were using missions to build their own religious stronghold outside of the church’s authority. And indeed they were right. In the late nineteenth century, women such as Mrs. Mary Nind and Miss S. B. Loring, for whom professional ministries in the church were closed, served as paid agents for the mission societies. Nind, a Methodist, crisscrossed the western states from Minnesota to Oregon, stirring up enthusiasm for missions,

traveling over the unbroken prairie and through the wilderness, in wagon, or cart, or sleigh, in summer and winter, by day and by night, by freight train or day coach (never in a Pullman, for the Lord’s money was too precious for such luxuries), compassing as many as 5,000 miles in a single year.⁶⁸

Loring, a Presbyterian, also maintained a rigorous schedule, traveling through Pennsylvania and Ohio. In less than a year after she assumed her position she had conducted nearly two hundred meetings and helped in the organization of nearly fifty new societies.⁶⁹

National Organizations and Leadership

On the national level, women such as Helen Barrett Montgomery and Lucy Peabody provided dynamic leadership for the women’s missionary movement that resulted in rapid growth in strength and numbers. They encouraged ecumenical unity among mission societies and made the movement a force to be reckoned with. One of their most lasting endeavors was their missions educational work through the Central Committee for the United Study of Foreign Missions. “It was the first interdenominational project of the women’s boards and it was to be a lasting and significant one. In thirty-eight years the committee published more than four million textbooks that fostered knowledge and support of Christian missions around the world.”⁷⁰

Helen Barrett Montgomery

Besides her organizational work with the women’s missionary movement, Helen Barrett Montgomery was a prolific writer and a thought-provoking missiologist. Many of her works were published by the Central Committee, her first being Christus Redemptor: An Outline Study of the Island World of the Pacific. This book, unlike so many written by missionary enthusiasts, was a straightforward account of the problems wrought by western imperialism. The solution to this “unmitigated curse,” she believed was Christian missions:

The strongest reason why the conscience of Europe and America ought to continue and immensely strengthen its missionary forces in the island world is because we owe it to these people to make the largest, most costly and statesmanlike reparation for the ills inflicted on them by unworthy representatives of our race and by our still unchristianized governments.⁷¹

She could not separate evangelism from social work, and this was evident in her strong influence on the women’s missionary movement—a movement that placed high priority on humanitarian causes.

Montgomery’s classic Western Women in Eastern Lands, chronicled the fifty-year history of the women’s missionary movement from 1860 to 1910. She focused on the successful evangelistic endeavors and the progress that had been made in liberating women from their restrictive cultures:

It is indeed a wonderful story…We began in weakness, we stand in power. In 1861 there was a single missionary in the field, Miss Marston, in Burma; in 1909, there were 4710 unmarried women in the field, 1948 of them from the United States. In 1861 there was one organized woman’s society in our country; in 1910 there were forty-four. Then the supporters numbered a few hundreds; today there are at least two million. Then the amount contributed was $2000; last year four million dollars was raised. The development on the field has been as remarkable as that at home. Beginning with a single teacher, there are at the opening of the Jubilee year 800 teachers, 140 physicians, 380 evangelists, 79 trained nurses, 5783 Bible women and native helpers. Among the 2100 schools there are 260 boarding and high schools. There are 75 hospitals and 78 dispensaries…It is an achievement of which women may well be proud. but it is only a feeble beginning of what they can do and will do, when the movement is on its feet.⁷²

Female Missionary Power and Influence

The increase in numbers of women on the foreign field did not necessarily correspond with a similar increase in power. “The single missionary,” according to Valentin H. Rabe, “remained for decades a second-class citizen of the mission station.”⁷³ Yet in comparison to her sisters serving in the church at home the single woman missionary was allowed an unprecedented amount of freedom in her ministry, and her influence on mission-board policy and decision making gradually increased. This was evident in India prior to the turn of the century.

The rapid development of woman’s work, which is doing so much to hasten the day of redemption to truth and righteousness, appears in the fact that while at the first Conference at Allahabad, 1872–3, the sex was altogether unrepresented, at the second held ten years later, at Calcutta, there were 181 women, to 249 men among the members. However, though two had been appointed to prepare papers, it was not thought proper to have them presented by female lips. But ten years later still, at Bombay, where only 263 men were in attendance, and 276 women, the latter were admitted to full equality in every particular.

By 1890 India had a total of more than seven hundred foreign “female agents” and more than three thousand native “female agents.”⁷⁴

Female Mission Society Mergers

In spite of the impressive results of the women’s mission societies, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were loud voices calling for the merger of women’s missionary societies with the general boards. Since the general boards were accepting single women as candidates, it was argued that the women’s societies were no longer needed. One influential voice calling for a “mingling of men and women” in mission societies was A. T. Pierson, a well-known missionary statesman and the editor of Missionary Review of the World. Unlike most of his

The Women’s Missionary Jubilee Committee. Helen Barrett is seated in the center. From Missionary Review of the World 24:6 (June 1911): 401.

colleagues who supported mergers, however, Pierson advocated an equal role for women, not barring them from the position of board director “at the helm of affairs.” “If Priscilla be the equal of Aquila,” he wrote, “let her take rank with him, and if by superiority Priscilla outranks Aquila, let us not fear to put her name first.”⁷⁵

Pierson’s egalitarianism was not contagious, and, as one might have expected, there were strong protests against the idea of mergers, particularly from women who feared they would lose the limited power they had struggled so long to attain. Helen Barrett Montgomery had convincingly argued against such mergers at the Ecumenical Conference of 1900, and at that time there was widespread support for her position. By 1910, however, at the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, opinion was beginning to change, and in the decades that followed, one denomination after another (often after heated battles) opted for a merger.⁷⁶

Golden Jubilee Celebration

Any negative signals that came out of the Edinburgh Conference regarding the women’s missionary movement were overshadowed by the fifty-year Jubilee celebration held later that year. Two-day conferences featuring special speakers and luncheons were held in forty-eight cities across the country. In many instances women were turned away for lack of space. In Buffalo, tickets were sold out a week ahead of time, and in Pittsburgh nearly 5,000 attended the Jubilee activities. Lucy Peabody and Helen Barrett Montgomery were the main organizers and speakers. Indeed, Montgomery addressed some two hundred meetings in an eight-week period, and her Jubilee book, Western Women in Eastern Lands sold some fifty thousand copies.⁷⁷

The enthusiasm that the Jubilee generated was not enough to bring back the glorious age of women’s missions. “The hoopla surrounding the woman’s missionary Jubilee,” comments Patricia Hill, “obscured the first disturbing signs that the woman’s foreign movement was deteriorating at the auxiliary level.” Although the women had been duly reminded that the celebration should “glorify God, and nowhere degenerate into mere glorification of woman’s work,” according to Hill, it “did glorify woman’s work; at its worst it degenerated into an orgy of self-congratulation.”⁷⁸

Denominational Mission Societies

In the decade following the Jubilee some of the women’s societies continued to grow. Of all the denominational mission societies, the Methodist was the largest, “not only in absolute numbers but also in the percentage of church members recruited.” Between 1895 and 1920, its membership grew from some 150,000 to more than a half million. It was also one of the most independent of the denominational women’s missionary organizations, with virtual total control over the disbursement of funds.⁷⁹

In most instances, the denominational women’s missionary societies had very little real power besides that of increasing the female missionary force abroad. The Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church (North) is an example. Unlike the Methodist women, they had no control over their funds. The situation was similar to that of the American Baptist’s women’s missionary society.⁸⁰

Because of fear that women might misuse their power, the Southern Baptist Convention did not authorize a women’s board until long after such organizations had been formed in other denominations. “Many of the men,” writes Leon McBeth, “opposed the women’s work precisely because they perceived it to be related to or at least similar to the women’s rights movement.” The matter was considered a “difficult and delicate problem,” and Baptists were warned in 1882 that “a false step now might entail fatal embarrassments for years to come.” In 1888, with the support of influential Southern Baptist leaders such as H. A. Tupper and the tireless work of Annie Armstrong, the Woman’s Missionary Union was officially organized.⁸¹

But even Tupper was wary of allowing women too much authority over the disbursement of funds, and he frequently clashed with Annie Armstrong over such matters. On one occasion Armstrong, according to her biographer, wrote to Tupper’s assistant with an idea, suggesting “that he present it to Tupper and the Board as his plan and not hers. She felt that men were not receptive to plans coming from women.” On another occasion, when she proposed a project for the Womens Missionary Union, Tupper responded: “The best thing, in the matter of foreign missions

Six of the Founders of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. From Missionary Review of the World 17:7 (July 1905): 186.

the men and women of the country can do in my judgment is to raise money for the Board and let the Board appropriate it.”⁸² Indeed, the stated purpose of the Union was to help women “to be more efficient in collecting money and disseminating information of mission subjects”—hardly a militant feminist agenda. And the tone of comments made by organizing leaders was most conciliatory. Fannie Stout spoke for many women:

Much will depend on the spirit which we show. The brethren are our guardians—and when they realize what we want to do, that we do not wish to wander in any dangerous ways, but are only trying to follow them as our leaders and trying to carry into practice what they have taught us from the pulpit and press, their anxieties will cease.⁸³

Despite it’s slow start, the Baptist Missionary Union became one of the most effective denominational missionary societies in Protestant circles. This was in part because of the far-reaching influence of Lottie Moon. From China she wrote articles and letters urging women to do more for the cause of missions. In 1887, a year before the Woman’s Missionary Union was formed, she wrote: “Until the women of our Southern Baptist churches are thoroughly aroused, we shall continue to go on in our present hand-to-mouth system…I am convinced that one of the chief reasons our Southern Baptist women do so little is the lack of organization.”⁸⁴

The following year, Moon called for a special Christmas offering from the women of the Southern Baptist churches. The amount collected exceeded the goal and was sufficient to support three additional women missionaries. Moon responded enthusiastically:

What I hope to see is a band of ardent, enthusiastic, and experienced Christian women occupying a line of stations extending from P’ing-tu on the north and from Chinkiang on the south, making a succession of stations uniting the two…A mighty wave of enthusiasm for women’s Work for Women must be stirred.⁸⁵

The Christmas offering increased in the years that followed, but by far the greatest stimulus to its growth was the death of Moon. She had pleaded for relief funds for famine-stricken Tengchow and was grieved that the response was so paltry. She personally had done all she could to alleviate the suffering and was herself unable to eat among the masses of starving Chinese. She died of starvation and related complications, appropriately, on Christmas Eve of 1912. In the following decades the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering grew from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars annually.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, most women’s mission organizations were once again under at least partial control of men. Yet there was a spirit of independence that was summed up in a Scripture verse and used as a slogan by the Woman’s Missionary Society of the North Carolina Methodist Conference in 1920: “Behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it.”⁸⁶

British Women and Missions

It was on the American scene that the greatest enthusiasm for missions was generated by women, but across the Atlantic their British cousins were effectively conducting overseas ministries as well. Indeed, English women had been the first to become independently involved in foreign missions. The Society for Promoting Female Education in the East was founded in 1834, and the Church of Scotland Ladies’ Association for Foreign Missions, three years later. In 1852 the Zenana Bible and Medical Mission and a few decades later the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society developed out of that organization. Before these missions were formed, the Church Missionary Society (Anglican) had sent out single women, but in 1873, more than a half a century after the first woman had been commissioned, the Society “counted among its agents only eleven such women.” The last decade of the nineteenth century, however, witnessed a dramatic increase in single women. Between 1883 and 1893 the number of single women increased from fifteen to one hundred and thirty-four, and in 1894, the number reached one hundred and sixty. Less than a decade later, in 1901, that figure exceeded three hundred.⁸⁷

English women spread out all over the world in their missionary endeavors, but according to Augustus Buckland “Africa was one of the earliest lands in which the fruits of work, distinctively woman’s, were gathered.” It was there that Mary Moffat, with her husband Robert, served for some fifty years with the

An Assortment of Turn-of-the-Century British and American Women’s Missionary Magazines. From Missionary Review of the World 17:7 (July 1905): 403.

London Missionary Society and where Mary Slessor had worked so effectively for nearly four decades. It was there also that Bishop Alfred Tucker in 1894 escorted a party of English women into Uganda to establish mission work. Earlier that year he had sent out a strong appeal for single women, and the Intelligencer made public his views: “It is Bishop Tucker’s distinct opinion that…we must no longer delay in sending up Christian women…In the present circumstances of Africa women must be ready…to go with the distinct and solemn purpose of remaining single for a few years for the Lord’s sake.”⁸⁸

Along with the gains in women’s missionary work were the losses, and the most tragic loss of women in nineteenth-century English missions occurred in China in 1895. The massacre at Ku-Cheng claimed the lives of seven women and one man. A Times telegram from Shanghai told the gruesome story:

Mr. and Mrs. Steward, Miss N. Saunders, and Miss Lena Irish were burnt in the house. Miss Hessie Newcombe was speared and thrown down a precipice. Miss Marshall’s throat was cut. Miss Gordon was speared in the head. Miss Topsy Saunders was speared in the brain. Miss Lena Steward died from shock.⁸⁹

“Faith” Missions

It was on British soil that the concept of “faith” missions was first developed. While faith was considered a necessary ingredient for any mission endeavor, J. Hudson Taylor particularly stressed it in regard to finances in his development of the China Inland Mission. Instead of receiving a salary, missionaries were to depend on God by faith for their needs. Other missions followed suit, particularly in North America, and by the end of the nineteenth century there were many “faith” mission societies reaching into every “unreached” corner of the earth.

It is unfortunate that some of the most scholarly mission histories produced in recent years have virtually ignored the faith-missions movement. Kenneth Scott Latourette and Stephen Neill are examples, as are historians of women’s missionary work. R. Pierce Beaver says very little about faith missions in his American Protestant Women in World Mission, and monographs offer little more. Jane Hunter’s Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China mentions the China Inland mission only in a footnote. Patricia Hill, in her book, The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920, does not even give it that much coverage. She argues that after the first two decades of the twentieth century women lost interest in missions. She maintains that “foreign missions no longer particularly gripped the imagination of large numbers of laywomen in postwar America” and that young women looked for careers in religious education rather than in missions.⁹⁰

While such a generalization applies to the women’s missionary societies and many of the denominational boards, it does not take into account the burgeoning faith-mission boards that began emerging in the late nineteenth century and continued to increase in size and number well past the mid-twentieth century. Partly because of their financial policy, faith-mission boards did not attract the same “quality” of candidates as did boards that guaranteed salaries. Uneducated and unordained men and women often filled their ranks.

The China Inland Mission

Beginning with J. Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission, founded in 1865, single women were eagerly welcomed by the “faith” missions. In fact, in the first mission party that sailed to China sponsored by that newly formed mission, seven of the fifteen new recruits were single women (the remainder being married couples). On the field single women were often stationed far in the interior and were responsible for evangelism and church planting in large regions, with no immediate male supervision. A fascinating sketch relating to Taylor and the China Inland mission, written by Julius Richter, appeared in the Missionary Review of the World in 1898. This sketch vividly illustrates the negative reaction to Taylor’s policy regarding women:

Hudson Taylor makes extraordinarily ample use of the services of unmarried ladies; whole districts of the Chinese mission field are exclusively under the management of mission sisters. I took the liberty of suggesting how unbecoming and repellent to our German ideas was this free employment of single mission sisters in the midst of entirely heathen districts.⁹¹

Taylor responded by suggesting that Richter view the situation from a Chinese standpoint instead of through “German or European eyes.” He pointed out that the single women were required to be accompanied by a “married Chinese catechist,” and this provided her with fully adequate protection, and offered an important advantage in the evangelistic work:

The native catechist never comes to true inward independence at a station where he works under a European missionary; he feels himself to be only the dependent journeyman of the other, and is hardly noticed by the Chinese in presence of the overwhelming superiority of the European. It is quite otherwise when he is associated with a missionary-sister; then the whole work of teaching and preaching and representing the mission to outsiders devolves upon him; he counts as the head of the mission, and must act independently. But at the same time he is under the control of the mission sister, who is with him to advise and instruct him, and to report about him. The sister herself has a sufficient sphere of activity in the female part of the heathen population and the Christian Church, and if sometimes men also listen to her Bible lessons, no offense is given. Of course, a great deal of tact is necessary for the sister and the catechist to maintain their mutual position.⁹²

Later “Faith” Missions

Taylor was not alone among faith mission leaders in his staunch support of women. Fredrik Franson, the founder of The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM), under which Malla Moe had served, eagerly welcomed women into the ranks. In other faith missions—including the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Sudan Interior Mission, the Africa Inland Mission, the Gospel Missionary Union, and the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade—women also made up a high percentage of the recruits and sometimes administered vast regions with no immediate male supervision. Such was the case in Morocco in the 1930s, when Maude Cary and three other single women of the Gospel Missionary Union, were left in charge of the mission stations. The male missionaries had all left the field before the country was closed to missionaries at the outbreak of World War II, and the mission had no other choice but to turn the responsibilities over to women.⁹³

C. T. Studd, the founder of the Heart of Africa Mission, which later became known as the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, depended heavily on single women in his missionary endeavors in Africa. A great revival occurred in the mission in 1925, and among the results was an increased dedication of the missionaries, particularly women, to advance the gospel:

Single women go on long evangelizing treks among the villages, where there is a shortage of men; in one district, the worst cannibal in the region, who was reputed to have “a hundred black men inside him,” was led to Christ by a single woman missionary who visited his village. Two of the most thriving stations with congregations from five hundred to sometimes as many as fifteen hundred are “manned” by single women only. In some places where there have been only two workers, they have sacrificed human companionship and voluntarily separated in order that one may go farther afield and evangelize a new area, although the usual plan of the Mission is to place them in couples.⁹⁴

Eliza Davis George

In spite of the openness of faith mission leaders toward women and the support of men such as Pierson who advocated women in leadership positions in missions, very few were permitted such opportunities apart from the female missionary societies. The Maude Carys won their status only by default. One notable exception, however, was Eliza Davis George, who directed the Elizabeth Native Interior Mission. She was a Southern Baptist who had the distinction of being “the first black woman from Texas to go to Africa as a missionary.” In 1945, when she was sixty-five years old and had served for thirty-two years as a Southern Baptist missionary in Liberia, that denomination insisted that she retire. Unwilling to comply, she returned to Africa, supported by “Eliza Davis George Clubs,” and developed her new mission. The purpose of the mission was to train nationals for evangelism and church planting, and though it remained small and plagued with financial problems, it made an important contribution to the work of Christian missions in Liberia. In 1961 the directorship of the mission was transferred to a male national, but she continued in leadership until she was in her nineties.⁹⁵

Mission Specializations

Combined with the growing faith-mission movement was an increasing emphasis on various mission specializations such as medicine, translation and linguistics, radio, and aviation. And it was often through such specialized ministries that women were given the highest recognition for their service on the mission field.

Medical Missions

Medicine was a specialization in which women particularly excelled. Women doctors, from Clara Swain to Helen Roseveare, made an indelible mark on missions. Their humanitarian service could not have been carried out by anyone else—particularly in Asia in the early years of missionary medicine. This impact was noted in a missions periodical in 1910: “In Christianizing foreign lands, the woman physician is an absolute necessity. No other human being has her privileges in the harem, the zenana, or the humblest home.”⁹⁶

Clara Swain holds the distinction of being the first female missionary medical doctor. She went to India in 1870 and treated some fifteen hundred patients that first year. A decade later she was treating more than seven thousand patients a year. Yet, she, like most other medical missionaries, considered herself primarily an evangelist.⁹⁷

Swain’s contribution to medicine for women in India was widely recognized, but even more so was the service of Dr. Ida Scudder, the first woman in a long tradition of Scudder missionary medical doctors to India. But the fact that her father and grandfather had been missionary doctors in India did not make the profession appealing to her. In fact, as a young person she had determined that India was the last place she wanted to spend her life. On a visit back to India to help care for her mother who was ill, her vision changed. Her “call” to medical missions came one night after two Hindus and a Muslim had come to her parents’ home requesting help for their wives who were giving birth, but refusing her father’s help because custom forbade contact with the opposite sex.

It was a traumatic night for Ida. She wrote:

I could not sleep that night—it was too terrible. Within the very touch of my hand were three young girls dying because there was no woman to help them. I spent much of the night in anguish and prayer. I did not want to spend my life in India. My friends were begging me to return to the joyous opportunities of a young girl in America. I went to bed in the early morning after praying much for guidance. I think that was the first time I ever met God face to face, and all that time it seemed that He was calling me into this work. Early in the morning I heard the “tom tom” beating in the village and it struck terror in my heart, for it was a death message. I sent our servant, and he came back saying that all of them had died during the night. Again I shut myself in my room and thought very seriously about the condition of the Indian women and after much thought and prayer, I went to my father and mother and told them that I must go home and study medicine, and come back to India to help such women.⁹⁸

Scudder returned to the United States to begin her medical studies in 1895, and after graduating from Cornell Medical College, she left for India with her medical degree and a ten-thousand-dollar check donated by a wealthy supporter to be used to start a hospital. Soon after she arrived, construction began on a women’s medical complex in Vellore that developed a reputation for being one of the best medical training centers on the entire subcontinent. Large sums of money were needed to finance such a large undertaking, and Scudder had a great flare for fund raising, particularly among women’s missionary societies in the United States. But that fund raising and the ongoing ministry of the Vellore medical complex became the center of one of the most heated controversies in the history of the women’s missionary movement. With new government stipulations imposed on medical programs following Indian independence, Scudder believed that it was necessary to merge with other mission medical facilities—men’s hospitals and training centers that were run by male medical missionaries. She was convinced that the alternative to a merger was to be shut down.⁹⁹

Unconvinced by her reasoning were two women, Hilda Olson and Lucy Peabody, who had been her staunchest supporters and most enthusiastic fund raisers. They found it unthinkable to share with men the medical facilities that had been built by the sacrificial gifts of women in America for women in India. Lucy Peabody wrote to Scudder:

You must tell us where you stand before we can go out for more appeals. Some people say you favor this cooperation with the men. If you and the majority of the board go with the coeducational work and desire to turn our plant and endowment over to the men who have not done one single thing to help, of course the charter can be legally changed, and the board can give up and move out and let the men take charge.¹⁰⁰

Olson, who likewise served on the governing board of the Vellore Medical Compound, also responded bitterly to the proposal: “Vellore is as you say, God’s work, but I would like to add God’s work for women. Every dollar would have to be given back to the givers.”¹⁰¹

After years of wrangling and debate, the board voted for the merger, and Peabody and Olson angrily resigned their positions. It was a very difficult time for Ida and a low point for the women’s missionary movement. There was no easy solution to the problem, and it seems that Scudder, in her determination to save her medical complex, failed to appreciate the position of her female colleagues. Peabody and Olson had learned from experience that mergers of women’s missions with general boards invariably resulted in male control. They had worked too hard for women in India to let the cause be lost without taking a stand for what they believed to be right.

Another missionary medical doctor frequently surrounded by controversy was Helen Roseveare, who went to the Congo in the 1950s with high ideals and came back after her first furlough discouraged and ready give up missionary work. Her difficulties related to her role as a medical doctor and a woman in a mission in which all the leadership positions belonged to men. Her brilliant mind and strong personality were threatening to her male colleagues—so much so that the hospital she had built from the ground up at an old leprosy camp at Nebobongo was removed from her control and placed under the authority of a junior medical missionary who had just arrived on the field. This was a devastating ordeal for Roseveare:

In her terms, he’d just taken over Nebobongo—her place, which she’d built up out of nothing, out of her dreams, out of her heart, out of the money she’d raised. This was the place where she’d dug the water holes, cleared the ditches, fired the bricks. She had acknowledged the facts that you could not have two people in charge, that he was a man, and that in Africa a man was the superior being, so she handed over the keys. Then she found she couldn’t take it. Perhaps she had been her own boss too long. But now she had lost everything. She had always taken Bible class; Dr. Harris took it now. Dr. Harris organized the nurses, and Helen had always done that. Everything that had been hers was now his.¹⁰²

Roseveare perceived her problem to be a result of her singleness and believed that the obvious solution was marriage. On furlough she set her sights on a young doctor and tried desperately to win him. She restyled her hair, bought a new wardrobe, and even resigned from the mission in an effort to win his favor. “In the end, I jolly near mucked up the whole furlough,” she later wrote. “I couldn’t find a husband in the mission, so I got out of the mission. God let me go a long way, and I made an awful mess. Then God graciously pulled me back and the mission graciously accepted me back.”¹⁰³

In 1960 Roseveare returned to the Congo to continue her medical work but was frustrated in her efforts by the Simba Revolution. All whites were viewed as enemies, and she was no exception. Soldiers entered her bungalow one night and brutally beat and raped her, and later she was taken into captivity where again she was raped repeatedly. After her release she returned home to England, believing her missionary career was over, but after the revolution she was needed more than ever and was unable to turn her back on the pleas from African Christians for her to return. Her final term in Africa was not the successful climax to her missionary career that she had hoped for. Independence had made Africans more suspicious of white missionaries, and the uncompromising demands she made on her nursing students created animosity among them. And the fact that she was a woman only seemed to complicate the situation. As her term was coming to a close, she planned a celebration to include her farewell and her replacement’s welcome. But it was not a happy ending for her, as she later recalled: “At the last moment the whole thing fell to bits. The student body went on strike. I ended up having to resign the college where I’d been the director twenty years.”¹⁰⁴

Roseveare’s attitude toward missions and life in general could have been one of bitterness, but instead she was humbled by the experience and went on to share her insights on medical missions and singleness in conference lectures and books.¹⁰⁵

Translation and Linguistics

In other mission specializations also, women assumed prominent roles. Linguistics and Bible translation, once a male domain, became a major area of women’s missionary work in the mid-twentieth century. Yet it was a field that single women penetrated only slowly. When Eunice Pike and Florence Hansen enrolled at the Summer Institute of Linguistics in 1936 to prepare for ministry with the Wycliffe Bible Translators to go to the Mazatec Indians in Mexico, they were given less than an enthusiastic welcome. They “did not impress Legters [the co-founder of the mission] as appropriate pioneer material. This, he felt, was a job for rugged men. He had not encouraged women to join the crusade—but these two had turned up.”¹⁰⁶

There were other grim warnings that these young women had to contend with, as Pike later related:

Some people had reminded Mr. Townsend that Latin American women never traveled alone, never lived alone, and were always well chaperoned. With genuine concern for Florrie and me, they had said that any attempt on our part to live in an Indian village would be misunderstood by the people and could only end in disaster.¹⁰⁷

Despite such reservations, Pike and Hansen became the first single women to be accepted by Wycliffe, and Pike continued on in the work for decades.

There were a number of reasons why it was believed that women would be unsuitable for the task of tribal translation work. The problem of finding a suitable female informant was one, but that proved to be far less difficult than had been anticipated, and in many cases women used male informants without creating scandal in the local culture. Another problem that was raised in reference to women concerned the danger they would be exposed to in remote tribes. This fear also proved to be unfounded. Indeed, women were generally exposed to less danger than were men. A prime example is the case of Loretta Anderson and Doris Cox. They began their work in 1950 among the headhunting Shapras in the Peruvian jungle, and within a few years many in the tribe had turned away from headhunting and witchcraft and accepted Christianity. Years later, Tariri, the chief of the tribe, confessed to Cam Townsend, the mission leader, “If you had sent men, we would have killed them on sight. Or if a couple, I’d have killed the man and taken the woman for myself. But what could a great chief do with two harmless girls who insisted on calling him brother?”¹⁰⁸

Another female Wycliffe Bible translator to make a friendly contact with a hostile tribe was Rachel Saint, who, with Elisabeth Elliot, entered the Auca tribe less than three years after her brother Nate and Elisabeth’s husband, Jim, and three others had been slain by them. It was through these women that many of the Aucas turned to Christianity.¹⁰⁹

Another advantage that single women had over their married colleagues was that they had more time to devote to the arduous task of language learning, and there have been many success stories as a result. In 1956, after nine years of language work with the Tzeltal tribe in Mexico, Marianna Slocum distributed copies of her newly translated New Testament to the tribespeople and soon thereafter left with her partner, a nurse, to do translation work in another tribe. They left behind not only the New Testament, but also Old Testament stories, hymns, and primers, and more importantly an indigenous church that had developed during their years of residence. In 1965, eight years after beginning their work with another group of Tzeltal Indians, the Bachajon New Testament was completed.

“How much does it cost?” was the oftrepeated question as the Indians stood in line. Seventeen and a half pesos was, of course, the answer to the question they had in mind, but the actual answer could never be given in pesos. Loneliness, illness, unfriendliness, primitive living conditions, and the sacrifice of marriage and family all made up the cost of the Bachajon New Testament. It was a heavy price, but one Marianna gladly paid. And when her work with the Bachajon people was over, she and Florence started all over again in the Andes Mountains of Colombia.¹¹⁰

Gospel Recordings

Another area of mission specialization pioneered by a woman involved the taping and reproduction of gospel messages into tribal languages that had not yet been reached by Bible translators and linguists. The organization that grew out of this ministry became known as Gospel Recordings, founded in 1941, by Joy Ridderhof, a single missionary to Honduras who had left the field because of poor health. It was in her attic apartment in California, while recuperating from her illness, that she conceived of the idea of sending messages back to Honduras on records. Her first efforts were so successful that missionaries from other areas requested her services. Eventually she and her staff members were traveling all over the world locating bilingual tribespeople to record short Christian messages for people who had never before heard the gospel. In the eyes of critics, it was superficial evangelism at best, but the testimonies of conversion in remote tribes all over the world that the mail brought in was all that was needed to convince Ridderhof that the ministry was a valid one.¹¹¹

Missionary Aviation

The area of mission specialization that has been the most closed to women has been that of aviation, and yet even that specialization was initiated largely through the efforts of a woman pilot, Elizabeth Greene. She had served in the Air Force during the early months of World War II, but her heart was not in the military service. She viewed her training as preparation for future service in missionary aviation, a specialization that was only in the very early developmental stages. It was during the war that Greene wrote an article for a Christian magazine, presenting the need for missionary aviation. The article was spotted by a Navy pilot who promptly contacted Green, asking her to join him and some other pilots in founding an organization that later became known as Mission Aviation Fellowship. Her flying service with that organization included terms in Mexico, Africa, and Irian Jaya. Despite her impressive record of flying experience, she faced sex discrimination in her ministry, and she perpetuated that attitude in her own philosophy of missionary aviation by defending MAF’s initial policy of refusing female applicants.¹¹²

New Mission Strategies

One of the last fields of missions for Western women to penetrate has been that of missiology, a field that is still heavily dominated by men. This is true in part because women have not had held high positions on mission boards and in mission schools of higher learning, but it is also due to the fact that women have simply not taken the initiative in this area. In the early years of the twentieth century, Helen Barrett Montgomery published works relating to mission strategy, as did Jean Kenyon Mackenzie. They “called on evangelical Christians to participate in the modernization of other cultures and to adapt the techniques of business management to the science of missions.”¹¹³ Their writings made a significant impact on mission board policy, but with the demise of the women’s missionary movement, few women have offered their experience, knowledge, and creativity to develop new mission strategies.

One of those rare women was Constance Padwick (1886–1968), who served for three decades among the Muslims in Egypt and Palestine and then served the remaining decade of her missionary career in Sudan and Turkey. She was a prolific writer, and as a missionary it was her passion to provide attractive Christian literature for Muslims. She recognized the necessity of first having an understanding of Islamic culture and faith, and that prompted her to write Muslim Devotions, a work that resulted from more than twenty years of collecting and studying popular devotional books from various parts of the Middle East. She wrote dozens of articles and books throughout her missionary career, her most widely acclaimed being Temple Gairdner of Cairo, a biography of her colleague and a great missionary statesman.¹¹⁴ In many ways, Padwick was missiologically ahead of her time. She insisted that the missionary have an understanding of Islamic thought. She argued that there were “two religious languages” that separated Christianity from Islam, and that the missionary’s failure to understand the Islamic language was “one of the real problems of evangelization.”¹¹⁵

Among those few who have entered the field of missiology in recent years are Marguerite Kraft, B. V. Subbamma, Ruth Siemens, and Elizabeth Brewster. Kraft, a former missionary to Nigeria and the wife of Charles Kraft, has made an important contribution to evangelism methodology in her work, World view and the Communication of the Gospel: A Nigerian Case Study. Here she challenges the missionary to gain an understanding of a particular culture’s world view, and then to use that insight in a more effective communication of the Christian message. Like so many missionary women before her, Kraft has not espoused a feminist ideology in her concept of mission: “I do not see it my responsibility as an outsider to ‘free’ women up to be like me. If that change comes through the study of Scripture and the leading of the Holy Spirit, that is fine. But it is not my Christian responsibility to upset the society by redefining the roles.”¹¹⁶

Subbamma, an Indian national who did her graduate work at the Fuller School of Mission, has stirred debate through her controversial approach to Hindu evangelism. As a caste Hindu, who was converted to Christianity in her youth, she had accepted the Western approach to evangelism that required a mixing of castes in Christian circles. She has since abandoned that position and in her book, New Patterns for Discipling Hindus,¹¹⁷ has called for a respect for Indian culture, including the caste system.

Ruth Siemens’ contribution to missiology lies largely in the concept of “tentmaking” missions—missions conducted by laypeople who have secular employment in crosscultural settings. She herself served as an elementary and high-school teacher in Peru, during which time she was actively involved in evangelistic work. Since that time she has written articles and given papers on the subject and has founded Global Opportunities, a mission directly involved in placing missionary-minded Christians in secular employment overseas.

Elizabeth Brewster teamed up with her husband, the late E. Thomas Brewster, in strategic mission endeavors, and, like other missiologists, they stirred up controversy. Their textbook Language Acquisition Made Practical (LAMP) has been viewed by some as a highly creative and innovative solution to the difficulties of language study, and as impractical by others. Likewise their work on the subject of bonding has created strong differences of opinion. They expect participants in their crosscultural missionary projects to meet four conditions: willingness to live with a national family, limiting personal belongings to less than fifty pounds, using only local public transportation, and learning the language by developing personal relationships. They warn those who follow their philosophy of bonding that there may be serious problems to deal with. “The bonded missionary is invariably viewed with suspicion by nonbonded colleagues. At best they may think him to be a maverick, at worst a traitor.”¹¹⁸

There are many less well-known women in recent years who have developed missiological principles in their day-to-day work on the mission field. An example is Ann Croft. As a schoolteacher in Nigeria, Croft had not anticipated being heavily involved in crosscultural evangelism, but through a deep friendship with one of her students, she developed an effective ministry with the Fulani people, who were largely Muslim. Realizing the importance of cattle to the Fulani people, she devoted her time to upgrading veterinary services, showing the people in a unique way that their concerns were hers. She also made a special effort to make Scripture relate to their culture. “In the Bible she found numerous references to nomadic cattle-herding peoples who played special roles in biblical history.” Through the cooperation of a mission organization, she involved the Fulani in an evangelistic conference, which proved to be the turning point. “At the end of the evangelistic conference, the chief of the area said to Ann that he wanted his people to become part of the Christian community.”¹¹⁹

A Backward Glance

The accomplishments of women during nearly two centuries of foreign missions has been without precedent in the history of Christianity. At no other time were women permitted so much latitude in Christian ministry. Their work ranged from evangelism and church planting to translating Scripture and teaching in seminaries. Ironically, the opportunities were available to them, not because Bible scholars had come to new conclusions as they exegeted Scripture, but rather because of geographical and cultural factors. For most of the women, however, the rationale for their permission to serve did not matter. Their motivation was, as it always had been, simply to serve God, and for that they were willing to sacrifice marriage, family, and the comforts of their homeland. And in doing so, they made a profound impact on the growth of world Christianity.

Yet, despite their contributions, women were frequently viewed as God’s second best. Their work was acceptable only because there were not enough men to fill the ranks as missionaries. Some men certainly expressed such views, and women, too, often had a low estimate of their worth. Gladys Aylward, the famous unmarried woman missionary to China, confessed her insecurities as a woman in these words:

I wasn’t God’s first choice for what I’ve done for China. There was somebody else…I don’t know who it was—God’s first choice. It must have been a man—a wonderful man. A well-educated man. I don’t know what happened. Perhaps he died. Perhaps he wasn’t willing…And God looked down…and saw Gladys Aylward.¹²⁰

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