7. Narcissa Prentiss Whitman and American Protestant Missionaries
7
Narcissa Prentiss Whitman and American Protestant Missionaries
I’ll never forget that sunny August morning, walking alone through the grounds of the Whitman Mission in Walla Walla, Washington. Tall clumps of rye grass still grow on this site that the natives called Waiilatpu, “place of the rye grass.” There I sensed a melancholy that still lingered from that Sunday, June 23, 1839, when little Alice Clarissa, only child of Narcissa and Marcus, drowned in the nearby stream—the Walla Walla River. I could not comprehend the indescribable anguish this mother must have endured. But when such searing sadness settles into a place, it is sometimes felt for centuries. Here on that clear and cloudless morning the tears of sorrow still seemed to saturate the soil and nurse the swaying reeds of grass.
I have related Narcissa’s story in other books I’ve written, sometimes zeroing in on the discord at the Waiilatpu mission. As the mistress of the house, she often had to contend with other missionary families and run-of-the-mill settlers who assumed she somehow owed them free lodging for weeks on end. One flare-up, according to a guest, “came on so sharp that I was compelled to leave. . . . It is enough to make one sick to see what is the state of things in the mission.”1 When criticism is leveled at Narcissa, I become defensive. I put myself in her situation, and I can only imagine how easy it would be for a carefree individual to become cranky and resentful.
On the arduous covered-wagon journey to the foreign land of Oregon, Narcissa was upbeat, often reveling in the glories of nature—the wildlife, the trees and flowers and spectacular sunsets and snowcapped mountains. She was, by her own account, truly happy. Her marriage appeared to be solid, unlike that of Mary Walker, another Oregon missionary who, in her diary, repeatedly lamented the insecurities she felt about her marriage. How many times she wondered to herself if her husband really loved her, and how many times she longed for stimulating conversation. Elkanah, her husband, enjoyed lively interaction with men, but not with her.
The decision to marry, for many missionaries, was often a hurried affair based solely on mutual missionary callings. That the couple would have fallen in love or would have been compatible emotionally or intellectually was not necessarily a high priority.
For Narcissa Prentiss in her midtwenties, the call of God came through a story she had heard of the Nez Percé, who had pleaded that someone bring them the “Book of Life.” She would have packed her bags and set out for the Oregon Territory on her own, but single women were required to find husbands first. When Marcus Whitman, thirty-three and still single, heard of her predicament, he arranged a meeting, and, without the benefit of romance, they were married the following year.
The contributions of married women to missions were enormous, despite the fact that many, like America’s first celebrated woman missionary, Ann Judson, would die young in childbirth. For Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, mission work would be sandwiched between tragedy—the drowning of her little girl and her own grisly death in the midst of a wholesale massacre. A generation later, by the time Lottie Moon, Adele Fielde, Maude Cary, Malla Moe, and Mabel Francis were pursuing overseas ministry, mission agencies were accepting single women. Grateful for such opportunities, they nevertheless battled loneliness and the sting of second-class status.
NARCISSA PRENTISS WHITMAN
Mission Matron and Martyr
Growing up in Prattsburgh, New York, in 1808, Narcissa was one of nine children born to Judge Stephen Prentiss and his wife, Clarissa, devout Presbyterians. In 1824, having been schooled at the local Franklin Academy, sixteen-year-old Narcissa sensed God’s call during a religious revival and committed herself to foreign missionary service. The Nez Percé of the Oregon Territory, she had learned from an oft-repeated story, were pleading with someone to bring the “Book of Life.” More than a decade would pass, however, before she could answer that call. As those years passed, she feared she would have to resign herself to being an old-maid schoolteacher.
Indeed, she might have remained single, teaching school for the remainder of her life, but for a visit from Marcus Whitman, who was about to set out for Oregon on an exploratory expedition in the spring of 1835. If mission work in the West proved feasible for him, accompanied by a wife, he proposed that he return to marry her and they then set out for Oregon together. He returned, and they were married in February 1836.
The cross-continent trip to Oregon, from western New York, was arduous. The weather was either too hot or too cold; the natives hostile; and the mountain trails so steep that cattle and wagons had to be left behind. Yet during most of the trip, Narcissa enjoyed good health and great optimism as is indicated in her letters and journal from March 15 to September 1, 1836. Her greatest anguish came from poor mail service—not receiving letters from home, particularly from her parents and four younger sisters:
We left Pittsburgh this morning at ten o’clock and are sailing at the rate of thirteen miles an hour. It is delightful passing so rapidly down the waters of the beautiful river. . . . Can scarcely resist the temptation to stand out to view the shores of this majestic [Mississippi] river. Varied scenes present themselves as we pass up beautiful landscapes. . . . We are now in port. Husband has been to the office, expecting to find letters from dear, dear friends at home, but find none. Why have they not written? . . . But I am not sad. My health is good. My mind completely occupied with present duty and passing events. . . . I have one of the kindest husbands, and the very best every way. . . . Twilight had nearly gone when we entered the waters of the great Missouri, but the moon shone in her brightness. It was a beautiful evening. . . . I wish I could describe to you how we live so that you can realize it. Our manner of living is far preferable to any in the States. I never was so contented and happy before neither have I enjoyed such health for years. . . . I do not know as I was ever so much affected with any scenery in my life. . . . You can better imagine our feelings this morning than we can describe them. I could not realize that the end of our long journey was so near. We arose as soon as it was light, took a cup of coffee, ate of the duck we had given us last night and dressed for Walla Walla. We started while it was yet early, for all were in haste to reach the desired haven.2
Along the way, Narcissa had become pregnant, and on March 14, 1837, on her twenty-ninth birthday, baby Alice Clarissa was born. She was the darling of her parents, and her death as a toddler, at just over two years and three months, was devastating to them. On June 25, 1839, Narcissa wrote to her sister:
You make some important inquiries concerning my treatment of my precious child, Alice Clarissa, now laying by me a lifeless lump of clay. Yes, of her I loved and watched so tenderly, I am bereaved. My Jesus in love to her and us has taken her to himself. Last Sabbath, blooming in health, cheerful, and happy in herself and in the society of her much loved parents, yet in one moment she disappeared, went to the river with two cups to get some water for the table, fell in and was drowned. . . . Husband and I were both engaged in reading. She had just a few minutes before been reading to her father; had got down out of his lap, and as my impression, was amusing herself by the door in the yard. . . . But she had gone; yes, and because my Saviour would have it so. He saw it necessary to afflict us, and has taken her away. Now we see how much we loved her, and you know the blessed Saviour will not have His children bestow an undue attachment upon creature objects without reminding us of His own superior claim upon affections.3
The following year, on May 2, 1840, Narcissa wrote of issues they were having with the nearby Native Americans. As was true of all the Oregon missionaries, merchants, and traders, she saw whites as superior and could not comprehend why the native peoples were not more appreciative of their ministry and why they would resent the landgrab:
A tide of immigration appears to be moving this way rapidly. What a few years will bring forth we know not. . . . [The natives] said we must pay them for their land we lived on. They are an exceedingly proud, haughty and insolent people, and keep us constantly upon the stretch after patience and forbearance.4
The tension between missionaries and native peoples only increased in the following years. Marcus provided medical assistance, but the natives suspected that he was trying to poison them. Though many of them continued to attend meetings, Narcissa felt uneasy in their presence. A series of letters in 1842, especially those to her single sister, Jane, expressed her loneliness, sickness, and terror of being alone when Marcus was traveling.
Jane, I wish you were here to sleep with me, I am such a timid creature about sleeping alone that sometimes I suffer considerably, especially since my health has been not very good. . . . Dear Jane, I am sick tonight and in much pain—have been scarcely able to crawl about all day. . . . I have this day entered upon my thirty-fifth year, and had my dear Alice C. been alive she would have been five years old, for this was her birthday as well as mine. Precious trust! She was taken away from the evil to come. I would not have it otherwise now. . . . I got dreadfully frightened last night. About midnight I was awakened by some one trying to open my bedroom door. . . . Soon the latch was raised and the door opened a little. I sprang from the bed in a moment and closed the door again. . . . Thanks be to our Heavenly Father. He mercifully “delivered me from the hand of a savage man.”5
Settlers pouring into the Oregon Territory took advantage of the Whitmans, whose mission station had essentially turned into a trading post and inn. Or was it the other way around? Were the Whitmans taking advantage of travelers by charging exorbitant prices, as some claimed? Their fertile land and bountiful harvests were the envy of new immigrants. Among those who came to the mission in 1844 were seven orphans, whom Narcissa took into her home—in addition to the four children she had already taken in.
I have now a family of eleven children. . . . I get along very well with them; they have been to school most of the time; we have had an excellent teacher, a young man from New York. . . . I wish you could see me now in the midst of such a group of little ones; there are two girls of nine years, one of seven, a girl and a boy of six, another girl of five, another of three and the baby, she is now ten months.6
By the summer of 1847, immigrants were passing through nonstop, all but Jane. Despite the increasing tension with the natives, Narcissa was somehow convinced that things would be much better for her if only her sister would join her.
For the last two weeks immigrants have been passing, probably 80 or 100 wagons have already passed and 1,000 are said to be on the road. . . . Two men are at this place on their way to the States. One of them, Mr. Glenday, intends to return to this country next spring with his family. I have importuned him, and made an arrangement to have you accompany them to Waiilatpu. Now Jane, will you do it? I know you will not refuse to come. . . . Believe me, dear Jane, and come without fail, when you have so good an opportunity.7
Only six weeks after her last letter begging Jane to come, Narcissa was dead. The grim statement detailing the slaughter was not dated until several months later in a letter from a fellow missionary, Henry Spaulding. His opening lines relating to his own deliverance by the hand of God must have seemed hollow and almost crass to Narcissa’s grieving family:
Through the wonderful interposition of God in delivering me from the hand of the murderer, it has become my painful duty to apprise you of the death of your beloved daughter, Narcissa, and her worthy and appreciated husband, your honored son-in-law, Dr. Whitman. . . . They were inhumanly butchered by their own, up to the last moment, beloved Indians, for whom their warm Christian hearts had prayed for eleven years. . . . The massacre took place on the fatal 29th of November last, commencing at half past one. Fourteen persons were murdered first and last. Nine men the first day. . . . Sister Whitman in anguish, now bending over her dying husband and now over the sick; now comforting the flying, screaming children, was passing by the window, when she received the first shot in her right breast, and fell to the floor. . . . Your dear Narcissa, faint with the loss of blood, was carried on a settee to the door. . . . She groaned, she lingered. The settee was rudely upset.8
What had begun with so much promise ended with the most shocking missionary massacre in the history of Christianity. The killers were motivated not by a hatred of the gospel message but by fear—fear fused with rage against those who were taking their land and threatening their way of life.
ADELE MARION FIELDE
“Mother of Our Bible Women”
It was a clear May morning in 1865 as the ship entered the Hong Kong harbor after a perilous sea voyage from America. The journal entries tell the story: After having weathered a series of storms and a typhoon “that mauled and drove our ship for days . . . jungle fever seized all on board save the captain,” leaving ten of the crew dead. The writer herself, while in a coma, “was thought to have died.” But now having arrived she hoped the worst was behind her. “I was barely able to stand, and Miss Sands, who had partially recovered arrayed me in white.”9
Adele was arrayed in white because it was to be her wedding day. Her fiancé, Cyrus Chilcott, a newly appointed Baptist missionary, would be rowed out to the ship, and the captain, as he had promised, would perform the ceremony. They waited only to learn that Cyrus was not among those who had been ferried from the shore. Instead, the small delegation boarded the ship for the grim purpose of informing her that the intended groom had died of typhoid fever a few months earlier.
Born into a working-class Baptist family in East Rodman, New York, Adele was a curious child who was quick to question matters of creed and doctrine. As a teenager she determined she would hang her hat with the Universalists, who, to her liking, consigned no one to hell. After studying at a state college, she became a schoolteacher, earning enough to live on half her salary while sending the remainder to her aging parents. At twenty-five she was a “confirmed old maid,” until she met Cyrus, her best friend’s brother. She fell in love, became engaged, and agreed to become a Baptist and sail to Hong Kong to serve as a missionary wife in Thailand.
With his death, her dreams had been dashed. The ship’s captain pleaded with her to wait in Hong Kong and return with his vessel to America. Hardly capable of rational thinking, she turned him down, deciding instead to continue on to Thailand to at least kneel at his grave and feel his presence in the house he had prepared for her, as she wrote in a letter in the Baptist Missionary Magazine:
I have journeyed seven weary months over tempestuous seas and in strange lands to meet my beloved and I found his grave with the grass upon it seven months old. I have come to my house; it is left unto me desolate. While I stood holding out my hand for a cup of happiness, one of fearful bitterness was pressed violently to my lips. I looked joyful to Providence and it turned upon me a face of inexpressible darkness. And because I believe in God I have been able to endure it.10
Through sheer determination, she vowed to carry out the mission work Cyrus had been commissioned to do. That was not, however, what the mission director had in mind. There was no place for a single woman—particularly one who wanted to do the work of a man. But considering her sorrow, she was permitted to stay on. There, amid her deep grief, she learned Chinese and began ministering to Chinese people in Bangkok. A brilliant linguist, she communicated effectively with the people, all the while struggling to fit into the tight strictures of the Baptist mission. When she discovered that her salary was only half that of a single male colleague, she demanded equity. The conflict stretched out for two years before her salary was doubled to match his, with one year of retroactive pay.
But now the tables were turned on her. True, she was very effective in her mission outreach, but she did not fit into the mission community. She was accused of socializing with unbelieving merchants and diplomats during her free time, joining in card playing and dancing. When she was warned that such activities put her ministry in “extreme peril,” she agreed to give up card playing. To renounce dancing, however, was simply too much to ask. For months she was in limbo as letters were exchanged and controversy raged. Then it was over. After serving six years in Thailand, she was ordered to return home. So upset was she that she fashioned a pipe and “smoked six thimblefuls” of hashish.11
Thinking her missionary service was behind her, Adele set sail for America on a ship that made a stopover in a South China port. There she was befriended by resident missionaries who recognized her capabilities and dedication to evangelism. With their appeal to the home office, she was permitted, after a stay in America, to return and work with them. During the next two decades, she would focus her attention on training Bible women. Others before her had worked alongside such native assistants, but she took the concept to another level by establishing schools, writing and publishing materials, assigning and supervising circuit ministries, and working herself out of a job by training the women to teach new recruits and carry out the work themselves.
During a furlough in America in 1883, Adele discovered that she had become somewhat of a celebrity. Besides writing materials for Bible women, she had written stories about these women for magazine publications, later compiled in a book, Pagoda Shadows. Speaking invitations piled up, but she spent most of her two-year furlough studying at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. She was recognized as a scholar, and before she returned to China, she turned down an invitation to serve as president of Vassar College.
Upon returning to China, Adele spent the next four years stabilizing her work before retiring to America in 1889. In the space of twenty years, she had trained some five hundred Bible women, several of whom were competently teaching others. She had faced many problems along the way, but her work would serve as a model for other Western missionaries and Chinese women.
In the remaining quarter century of her life, she devoted herself to nonmissionary activities, summed up in the subtitle of a recent biography: Feminist, Social Activist, Scientist. These three roles were closely tied together, her work as an entomologist, for example, serving to inform public understanding of the spread of disease by fleas. Her social activism included her efforts to establish hospitals, and she viewed her demand for women’s rights in terms of betterment of humankind.
During this period of her life, she maintained very little association with Baptist missions. In fact, some might view her as a brilliant young woman who fell in love with a missionary only to become sidetracked in China missions for two decades until she escaped to follow her true calling as a scientist and a proponent of social causes. When she died in 1916, the Baptist Foreign Mission Society did not even publish her obituary. Ten years later, however, the society eulogized her as the “mother of our Bible women and also the mother of our Bible schools.”12
CHARLOTTE (LOTTIE) DIGGS MOON
Southern Belle, Equal Rights Advocate
“What women want who come to China is free opportunity to do the largest possible work. . . . What women have a right to demand is perfect equality.” Even for today those are fighting words in Southern Baptist circles, where male headship reigns. But these words were hurled at a male superior in the nineteenth century by Lottie Moon, the most celebrated missionary of that denomination. To her mission board back home, she wrote: “Simple justice demands that women should have equal rights with men in mission meetings and in the conduct of their work.”13
A southern belle born in 1840, Lottie grew up on a thirteen-hundred-acre Virginia slave plantation some twenty miles from Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson. With the outbreak of the Civil War, as the boys went off to fight, she was forced to stay home and help her widowed mother with the work. After the war she became a teacher, but the work was tedious. What else could she do but marry and have babies and become a proper matron? She longed to travel, to move beyond the struggles and confines of the postwar South. But she was stuck as a teacher in a tiny school in Cartersville, Georgia. Then in 1872, her younger sister Edmonia, still in her teens, sailed for China to serve as a missionary. The next year, Lottie followed. It might have become an illustrious partnership but for Edmonia’s “good for nothing” behavior and her knack for being “very burdensome” to other missionaries.14 Despite Edmonia’s bent for doing “queer and unreasonable things,” when she left after four years, Lottie became lonely and depressed.
Another individual who contributed to her loneliness and depression was Crawford Toy, a Confederate army chaplain. He had “come a-wooing” soon after the war, and now he was wooing again. He was contemplating mission work in Japan and was convinced she would be a perfect partner. There was just one problem. He had been influenced not only by German higher criticism of Scripture but also by Darwinian evolution. On that count alone, Lottie broke up with him. He would become a professor at Harvard, while she, as she later reflected, was left to “plod along in the same old way.”15
In China, the exciting life that she had imagined was nowhere to be found. She was assigned to teach in a girls’ school, where she encountered only “dull” and “unstudious” minds. She had her heart set on evangelism—to “go out among the millions.” In exasperation, she asked: “Can we wonder 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.”16
Finally at age forty-four, after twelve years in China, Lottie struck out on her own as an evangelist. She relocated in Pingtu, where she quickly discovered what life was like when she was no longer protected by the walls of a little school surrounded by other missionaries. She was now the local “devil woman,” taunted as she made her way through the narrow streets. But slowly the taunts turned to curiosity. Men demanded to learn, even as women had, about the strange stories she had in her book. Within a few years her first converts were baptized. The little church, soon with a Chinese pastor, grew to more than one thousand, becoming the fastest growing Baptist work in China. To loved ones back home, she wrote: “Surely there can be no deeper joy than that of saving souls.”17
During these years Lottie continued her village evangelism, taking long breaks in Tengchow, where her accommodations were more suitable. Here she wrote letters and articles that would transform her into a household name in Baptist circles throughout the South. Despite her cynicism and frequent rebukes, her popularity soared. “It is odd,” she scolded in an article, “that a million Baptists of the South can furnish only three men for all China. Odd that with five hundred preachers in the state of Virginia, we must rely on a Presbyterian to fill a Baptist pulpit [here]. I wonder how these things look in heaven. They certainly look very queer in China.”18
In her writings, she often appealed for “vigorous healthy women” to join her in China and for funds to support them. She called for a special Christmas offering to be collected by women, the first of which in 1888 brought in enough money to support three young women. Lottie was elated: “What I hope to see is a band of ardent, enthusiastic, and experienced Christian women occupying a line of stations extending from Pingtu on the north and from Chinkiang on the south, making a succession of stations uniting the two.”19
In the years that followed, Christmas offerings increased, and more women joined her in China. If we imagine Lottie as an imposing figure, talking down superiors and raising money among women as no one had ever done before, we do well to remember that her full height in sturdy shoes was considerably less than five feet—and, according to one source, barely more than four feet in height. The fact that she was not a tall, big-boned, blonde woman wearing a size-10 shoe no doubt served her well in an Asian culture where foot binding was still the custom.
But times were changing in China. The Boxer Uprising of 1900, followed by famines and outbreaks of the plague, created widespread turmoil and political upheaval. People all around her were starving. Lottie pleaded for relief offerings and resented the fact that Christians back home were so tight with their money. She depleted her own bank account, going without sustenance herself. She became depressed, even more so with the news in 1909 that her sister Edmonia had committed suicide by putting a gun to her head. They had faithfully corresponded, and Lottie was a world away, shrouded in grief.
That Lottie, amid severe depression, committed suicide herself is probably not entirely accurate. But she did starve herself to death. By the time that others realized how severe her condition was, it was too late. She died on Christmas Eve 1912 on a ship at port in Kobe, Japan. It would be impossible to exaggerate how much this news would influence the future of the “Lottie Moon Christmas Offering.” She was a symbol of self-sacrifice—one who presented her body a living sacrifice. Through fund-raising and recruitment, she exercised a profound influence on Southern Baptist missions.
MAUDE CARY
“Old-Maid Missionary” to Muslims
In 1901, when Lottie Moon was entering her final dismal decade in China, Maude Cary, with four other missionaries, was sailing to Morocco, under the banner of the Gospel Missionary Union. She might also have been filled with dreary thoughts of the future. It was no secret that work among Muslims came with few rewards—no hope of a thousand converts such as Lottie had in Pingtu. Nor could she ever muster the support of women in a large denomination.
Born on a Kansas farm in 1878, Maude, at age eighteen, enrolled at a Bible institute to prepare for a career in overseas missions. She was smart and independent, necessary qualities for success, but not ones well suited to her gender. Language training thus proved problematic, particularly considering her competitive nature. When she outscored the other students—perhaps with a bit of smugness—she was accused of being proud and aggressive. This would be only the beginning of her problems, however. Her first full review came at a field conference, during which time discussion was opened for the missionaries to critique one another. Having imagined things were going well, she heard otherwise. Indeed, she was bluntly told that she was forgetful and selfish, given to frivolous talk and unbecoming laughter. When the president of the mission arrived some weeks later, he advised her to return home. Utterly humiliated, she promised to mend her ways and was permitted to stay.
In the years that followed she studied Arabic and conducted village evangelism with no visible results. In her spare time she spent countless hours in an effort to learn the difficult Berber tongue. Why would she voluntarily put so much effort into learning a language not spoken among those to whom she was ministering? Is it possible her interest related to the fact that the unmarried George Reed was working among that tribal group? They had corresponded, and she no doubt hoped that learning Berber might be enough to spark his interest in her. Her ploy worked, and during the 1907 field conference he made overtures serious enough for her to consider his intentions equal to a marriage proposal.
By the following year, however, his ardor—if he ever had any—had cooled. To commemorate her thirtieth birthday she determined that she would seek meekness, because George let it be known that humility is what he wanted most in a wife. For the next six years until 1914, she saw little of George and was unsure of his intentions. Then without communicating to her, he made the decision to leave Morocco and begin mission work in the Sudan. Her dreams were dashed. She would spend her life as an “old-maid missionary.”
After serving in Morocco for more than two decades, she took a furlough and returned to America, now transformed by the Roaring Twenties. How odd she must have appeared, wearing the same hat and dress she had worn on her outbound voyage in 1901. Back in Kansas, she found her parents so frail that neither would survive to see her off again. Indeed, she questioned whether she should even go back to the field. What had she accomplished during that first lengthy term of service? Nothing at all if faithful converts were a measure of success. Knocking her head against the brick wall of Islam was a hopeless cause. But what were her choices? She had no immediate family, and at forty-seven, what other options were there? She returned to Morocco.
Once again submersed in Moroccan culture and mission outreach, Maude began to witness very slow and steady progress. Here and there were converts who did not back down in the face of persecution. But at the same time the mission force was dwindling until she and another single woman were the only missionaries left in the field. Two young women arrived, and then, with the onset of World War II, the doors were shut. There the women waited out the war, though hardly idle. By splitting up, they were able to continue the work at three outposts, Maude and the other seasoned missionary each working alone, while the two new recruits worked together.
When the war ended, more missionaries arrived, finding ministry opportunities already in place for them. Now the most seasoned of the missionaries, Maude worked with new recruits, and at age seventy-one was assigned to open a new mission station in El Hajeb. When the mission established a Bible institute in 1951, it enrolled three students its first year, two from El Hajeb. The following January she returned to America for health reasons and, it was presumed, for retirement. But later that year, now seventy-four, she returned and carried on in the work for another three years, setting the stage for widespread evangelism, with some thirty thousand Muslims enrolled in correspondence courses.
In 1967, twelve years after her departure, however, all missionaries were forced to leave Morocco. That same year, Maude Cary died. Apart from mission colleagues, very few others noticed. One of the missionaries forced to leave the Moroccan field was Evelyn Stenbock. She had arrived twelve years earlier in 1955, when Maude was departing. She had heard the accounts of Maude’s perseverance against all odds and made the decision to write the story down in a short biography, Miss Terri: The Story of Maude Cary. Without Evelyn’s work we would have never known of Maude, who represents thousands of missionary women whose stories would remain forever buried.
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
One of the benefits of being a writer is the gratefulness that often comes my way from people who have been inspired or challenged by one of my books. I trust that Evelyn Stenbock also enjoyed such expressions for her writings, more than a dozen of which are still available on Amazon. Although I profited from her biography of Maude Cary, I was disappointed that no excerpts from letters or diary entries were quoted—especially those between Maude and George. Were there none available? Without such sources, it is difficult to determine George’s investment in what Maude took to be a marriage proposal. Nevertheless, anyone who is interested in Maude owes a debt to Evelyn, who died at age eighty in 2009. In fact, I have now learned that she grew up on a farm in northern Wisconsin, less than seventy miles from the farm on which I was raised. She was a teenager the year I was born—so close and yet so far away, our only connection a book.
It is difficult to read that book without an incredible sense of wonder at Maude’s sacrifice. Today the term is often used where it is not warranted. The accounts of missionaries of prior generations, however, offer much-needed perspective on the call to sacrifice, to take up their cross to follow Jesus. It is true, however, that part of the appeal to mission work was the opportunity for adventure, though women were far less susceptible to the adrenaline rush that propelled men into unwarranted risk.
We shudder to read of Narcissa’s all-consuming terror when her door is nearly knocked down in the dead of night. She struggled with loneliness and depression, as did Adele, Lottie, and Maude. Families were worlds away, and letters and packages from home were few and far between. Mail service was unreliable, and when letters actually did arrive from home, the news often came in the form of sorrow and death, sometimes six months or a year old.
In many remote places in the world today, missionaries are only a text or email or Skype away from family back home. But as recently as the late 1980s, I found myself in a situation desperately trying (and failing) to reach Grand Rapids by phone from Kijabe, Kenya. Little more than a decade after that, Rift Valley Academy, an easy walk up the mountain, was boasting high-speed internet.
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
A 2014 check on Amazon shows no recent biography on the life and times of Narcissa Whitman (or her husband, Marcus). Do you think an up-to-date biography is perhaps overdue? Does her life interest you enough to want to know more about her?
How would you assess Adele Fielde as a Christian, as a missionary, and as a turn-of-the-twentieth-century modern American woman? Can you envision her life if she had never met and fallen in love with her fiancé? Has a chance meeting with someone ever made a life-changing difference for you?
Do you think Lottie Moon was too outspoken with her mission superiors? How would you compare and contrast these two China missionaries, Adele and Lottie? Which one would you most welcome into your home for a one-week visit?
If you were a woman’s mission board counselor or therapist and Maude Cary sought your advice, what are some suggestions and guidelines you might offer her in the realm of relationships?
Can you identify an author like Evelyn Stenbock who has influenced you by expending time and energy to bring to life an otherwise obscure woman of faith? Does her example inspire you to write and publish such a story?
Which of these women sacrificed the most for the least apparent results? Which one do you admire the most?