Gladys Aylward
SINGLE WOMEN MISSIONARIES:
“SECOND-CLASS CITIZENS”
From the earliest times, women have been actively involved in evangelism. Beginning in the New Testament and throughout the period of the early church and the Middle Ages and on into the era of modern missions, women have served effectively. Among Protestants, there were few opportunities for single women to serve in ministry until the mid-nineteenth century. Before that time the wives of missionaries—though not missionaries in their own right—stand out in many instances for their dedicated service. But there were other wives thrust into missions who did not want to be there. Dorothy Carey is a notable example. Edith Buxton, in her book Reluctant Missionary, tells of her struggles and of the unhappiness she felt for many years; and Pearl Buck writes of the years of discontentment her mother endured in China.
Yet if some married missionary women secretly resented their station in life, there were countless more single women who longed to be missionaries. Married women missionaries, with household duties and little children to care for, simply could not carry the load of work that needed to be done. “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.”1 Some men also saw the need for single women, but public opinion throughout much of the nineteenth century was opposed to the idea. Nevertheless, beginning in the 1820s, women were venturing overseas in a steady trickle.
Despite public opinion, beginning in the 1820s, women were venturing overseas in a steady trickle.
Even before this, however, there were Roman Catholic women who were conducting effective ministry in mission settings. One of the most remarkable of these women was Ann Marie Javouhey (1779–1851). She grew up in the French countryside during the time of the French Revolution and entered a convent as a young woman. Soon thereafter, she had a visionary call to serve as a missionary. She founded the Sisters of St. Joseph, and in 1822 began working in Africa. Within decades her blue-robed sisters were stationed all over the world. She was a strong woman, claiming God was her only authority—not her bishop. Stung by the insubordination, her bishop forbade her to participate in the Eucharist. She appealed to the archbishop, again demonstrating her strength of character: “I am not only the Superior General of the Congregation of St. Joseph of Cluny; I did not merely cooperate in the foundation of that Order; I am its sole and solitary foundress. I am its Mother General as God is its Father.”2 The archbishop ruled in her favor. When she died, there were some nine hundred nuns serving under her banner throughout the world.
In Protestant circles women were not involved in founding mission organizations until the last half of the nineteenth century, and none of those mission societies had a worldwide influence comparable to that of the Sisters of St. Joseph. Betsy Stockton was the first unmarried Protestant woman from America to serve as an overseas missionary. She was a black woman and former slave who went to Hawaii in 1823. Believing that God had called her to serve as a missionary, she applied to the American Board, and the directors agreed to send her abroad—but only as a domestic servant for another missionary couple. Despite her lowly position, Stockton was considered “qualified to teach” and was allowed to conduct a school. Later on in the 1820s, in response to a need for a single woman teacher, Cynthia Farrar, a native of New Hampshire, sailed for Bombay, where she served faithfully for thirty-four years under the Marathi Mission.
Not until the 1860s, with the beginning of the Women’s Missionary Movement, did single women in large numbers begin serving overseas. The idea for separate organizations for women first surfaced in England, but it quickly spread to America. By 1900 there were more than forty women’s mission societies in the United States alone. Largely because of the “female agencies,” the number of single women in missions rapidly increased; and during the first decade of the twentieth century, women, for the first time in history, outnumbered men in Protestant missions—in some areas by large proportions. In the Chinese province of Shantung in 1910, for example, among the Baptists and Presbyterians there were seventy-nine women and only forty-six men. In the decades that followed, the number of single women missionaries continued to climb until women outnumbered men in some areas by a ratio of 2:1 (with single women, married women, and married men each comprising approximately one-third).
In her classic book on missions, Western Women in Eastern Lands, published in 1910, Helen Barnett Montgomery wrote of the amazing strides taken by women in world evangelism:
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 4,710 unmarried women in the field, 1,948 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 millions. 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, 5,783 Bible women and native helpers. Among the 2,100 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.3
Overseas missions attracted women for a variety of reasons, but one of the most obvious was that there were few opportunities for women to serve in vocational ministry in the homeland. Ministry was considered a male profession. Some nineteenth-century women, such as Catherine Booth, broke into this male-dominated realm, but not without opposition. Wrote Booth, herself a Bible scholar, “Oh, that the ministers of religion would search the original records of God’s Word in order to discover whether … God really intended woman to bury her gifts and talents, as she now does.” Other women simply entered secular work. Florence Nightingale felt called to the ministry, but there were no opportunities: “I would have given her [the church] my head, my hand, my heart. She would not have them.”4 So the “foreign field,” far away from the inner sanctums of the church hierarchy, became an outlet for women who desired to serve God.
Besides the opportunities for Christian service, missionary work was an outlet for adventure and excitement. While men could fulfill their heroic fantasies as soldiers, seamen, and explorers, women had no such available options. Likewise, women such as Mary Slessor from poor, working-class backgrounds were able to raise their station in life through missionary careers. But the common thread among virtually all of the single women missionaries who sacrificially served abroad was a sense of calling from God—and equally important, a sense that they could make a difference. Their most universal concern beyond that of saving souls was to help their sisters living under oppression in “heathen” lands. They desired to offer women a taste of “civilization” that they enjoyed.
Missionary women were part of the larger missionary manifest destiny movement and came with a “can do” spirit of Western superiority. Although they “seldom wielded political power,” writes Dana Robert, “they worked in a context where American citizenship meant to have special privileges.” She continues:
Yet in its practice, “Woman’s Work for Woman” bore an ambiguous relationship to the realities of cultural imperialism. What appeared as a “holistic mission” from the missionary perspective was often perceived by the missionized as cultural imperialism designed to tear down their own customs and societies. The emphasis on social change toward western norms, couched in the language of helping to bring about God’s kingdom on earth, made “Woman’s Work for Woman” a partner with the myths of western superiority so prominent during the late nineteenth century. At the same time, its focus on global sisterhood and the essential unity of humankind was a valuable corrective to patriarchal notions that valued men over women and boys over girls in many parts of the world.5
One of the most effective nineteenth-century missionaries whose term of service was devoted to “Woman’s Work for Woman” was Adele Fielde, an individual who in many respects was an unlikely candidate for missionary greatness.
The life and public service of Adele Fielde (1839–1916) intersected with many facets of life besides overseas missions. Following her years of ministry in Thailand and China, she returned to the United States where she became a strong voice in the women’s movement and involved herself in scientific research. She was a confident, determined, and resourceful woman, whose missionary career powerfully illustrates the second-class status that confronted women who often sacrificed so much just to be permitted to give their lives in service to God.
Fielde grew up in East Rodman, New York, in a working-class family who were Baptists “of the tolerant New England kind.” But young Adele, “with her parents’ blessings, chose to be a Universalist, a more tolerant sect which believed in universal redemption, the salvation of all human beings.” She studied at the State Normal College in Albany and then became a school teacher. Still single at age twenty-five, she was regarded by some as a “confirmed old maid.” Then in 1864, she was introduced to her best friend’s brother, Cyrus Chilcott, a Baptist missionary candidate to Thailand. They became engaged, and she agreed to become a Baptist and to follow him to Thailand once he was settled there.6
What was expected to be a hundred-day sea voyage for Fielde turned into a much longer and more perilous and harrowing journey that ended in heartbreak. Fielde was an excellent writer, and lines from her journal tell the story best:
Great flakes of snow fell slowly on the deck as we stood watching the receding shore of native land…. During the ensuing night the waves rose high and for many consecutive days we were unable to leave our bunks…. In the Indian Ocean we encountered a typhoon that mauled and drove our ship for days…. As our ship passed slowly through the straits between Java and Sumatra … jungle fever seized all on board save the captain…. A chill like that of ice in the veins was followed by scorching fever…. While in a state of coma, I was thought to have died…. On a clear morning in May we entered the harbor of Hong Kong. Ten of the crew were carried ashore for burial…. I was barely able to stand, and Miss Sands, who had partially recovered, arrayed me in white.7
Dressed and ready, Fielde expected the groom to appear, and there on the ship they were to be married by the captain. But there was no groom. She soon learned that he had died of typhoid fever in Bangkok ten days after she had sailed from New York. The captain tried to convince her to sail back to NewYork with him, but she insisted that she must go on to Thailand. If she did not, she would live with an emptiness and incompleteness for the rest of her life. Her letter, published in the Baptist Missionary Magazine, tells of that time of anguish:
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.8
The Baptist mission work in Bangkok had been opened by William Dean in the 1830s, and the ministry was primarily aimed at Chinese people living there. Bangkok was only one of many locations where, due to prohibitions against mission work in China, “missions run by sixty Protestant missionaries had been established among Chinese immigrants.” Once China opened up after the Opium War, the Bangkok mission was relegated to secondary importance. That is how Fielde found it when she arrived in 1865. She was determined to continue Chilcott’s ministry, but that is not what the mission director had in mind: “Though Dean was sympathetic to Adele’s plight, he did not consider her to be a suitable addition to the Bangkok mission. He treated her not as a single woman but as a widow, and he hoped that she might attract a young male missionary.” Yet, due to her special predicament, the American Baptist Missionary Union permitted her to remain, “though it was against policy.”The more proficient in the language she became, however, and the more effective her ministry was, “the more Dean tried to restrict her.”9
The Baptist mission work in Thailand could not be considered a success story. In 1868 Fielde reported that since Dean had begun the work more than thirty-five years earlier, the fifteen missionaries who had served in the mission, on an average, could account for the conversion of “fewer than three native Christians,” and even some of those conversions were considered dubious at best. But she was optimistic: “I don’t believe our Lord sends His servants on useless errands.”10
Fielde’s commitment to the ministry was often tested by what she viewed as unfair mission policies. As a teacher she had a salary three times what her mission salary was, and she soon discovered that a single male missionary received nearly double her four-hundred-dollar annual allotment. She was straightforward in her appeal to the mission board back home: “I cannot see why an unmarried woman giving all her time to missionary work, paying all her own expenses, having precisely the same or equal expenses—does not require and should not receive the same salary as an unmarried man.”11 After two years of debate over the matter, the mission increased her salary, with retroactive pay for one year.
Fielde was optimistic about her mission work:“I don’t believe our Lord sends His servants on useless errands.
Fielde’s relationship with William Dean continued to deteriorate, particularly after she began appealing for more single women to come to Thailand—single women, without family, who were more cost effective than married men with their families. Dean accused Fielde of being “dangerous to the interests of the cause.” She was also accused of not being “a true Baptist, but a Universalist who chose to consort with the European community, bankers, diplomats, and other ‘unbelievers.’” Likewise, “she indulged in card-playing and attended dancing parties, forbidden by Baptists.” When she was called up short on her behavior, Dean was shocked when she responded: “I desire to be good. But I do not wish to be Pious.” When the mission board secretary wrote to her saying that the “incredible charges” that had been made against her put her ministry in “extreme peril,” she sought to defend herself, agreeing that card-playing was a mindless diversion but insisting that dancing was a wholesome exercise.12
The controversy over Fielde raged for months, and in the end she was ordered to return home, after most of six years of ministry in Thailand. To calm her nerves during her final months, she made herself a pipe and “smoked six thimblefuls of the kang cha [hashish]”—though she did not confess that indiscretion until years later. On her return trip to America, Fielde had a stopover at the Chinese port of Swatow on the South China Sea. There she was befriended by William and Eliza Ashmore, who invited her to return and work with them. They were impressed with her “high motives,” her good-natured personality, and her proficiency in the Chinese language.13
When she returned home, she discovered that she had become somewhat of a celebrity—largely because of her writings. She took speaking engagements, and with the mission board’s approval returned to work in China. With the Ashmores, Fielde reveled in the late-nineteenth-century triumphalism that characterized evangelical missions. Missionaries were “winning splendid victories,” Ashmore had written. They were “entering no battle but to conquer…. Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, are but the shadows of their former strength, and seem on the point of extinction.”14
Soon after she returned to China, Fielde became involved in the training of Bible women. “It was said that the conversion of one woman was worth the conversion of twenty men, and if the women could not be reached, there was no hope for the evangelical movement in China.” Training Bible women was not an idea introduced by Fielde; others had effectively conducted such work. But Fielde “institutionalized the program, explicitly defining its structure, mode of operation, and aims, and she implemented the plan with vigor, fully employing her organizational skills, and her capacity for hard work.” She had students ranging from their early twenties to their mid-seventies. “Overall, about five hundred passed through her school in a twenty-year period.”15
Her mission strategy was simple and served as a model for training Bible women throughout China:
It was Miss Fielde’s practice to gather Christian women for instruction and to teach them thoroughly one lesson from the Gospel. When they had learned it, she sent them out, two by two, into the country about to tell the lesson to villagers. After a time they were gathered at Swatow and received another portion of the truth and having obtained a thorough grasp of it, went forth to carry the good news of salvation.16
Fielde’s writing skills made her a priceless asset to the mission, as she wrote stories to be published and consumed by mission supporters. “She had each Bible woman tell her story, which she translated and published in magazines,” writes Leonard Warren. “Their heart-rending sagas proved enormously appealing to American women, who could sympathize with their suffering Chinese sisters.”17She later compiled the stories into a book, Pagoda Shadows. In addition to her teaching and writing, she compiled a Dictionary of the Swatow Dialect, which went through many publications.
In 1883 she returned to America for home leave, spending part of her time on a speaking tour and nearly two years studying at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia—the “happiest” years of her life. At the end of her furlough, she was asked to serve as president of Vassar College, but she turned down the offer, determined instead to return to her ministry in China with her faithful Bible women.
Fielde had trained her best students to train others, so when health problems developed, she was relieved that she could return home with good conscience. In 1889 she resigned the mission and spent the next two years traveling home through India, the Middle East, and Europe. Her last years were devoted to the suffragist movement, public lecturing, organizational work, humanitarian endeavors—and most notably, science. She conducted biological research on ants and published her findings in scholarly scientific journals. She was fascinated by the theories of the century’s most noted scientist, Charles Darwin, and found no discrepancy between science and religion.
In many respects, Fielde was an enigma regarding religious matters. A free-thinker from childhood, she broke from her family’s Baptist roots to become a Universalist, only to be baptized as a Baptist prior to her anticipated marriage. She faithfully served as a Baptist missionary for two decades and then turned to science. “After breaking with the Baptist Missionary Union, and shedding the certainties of sectarian Christianity,” writes Warren, “she never again joined any religious organizations…. Yet Fielde had not the slightest hesitation in proclaiming that Christianity was the best of all possible religions.”18 When she died in 1916, she left behind not only scientific research and writings on racial reconciliation but also Bible women who were training other Bible women and literature in Chinese that would be used for decades to follow.
At the time of her death, her Baptist mission society did not even publish her obituary in its official magazine. Ten years later, however, she was eulogized as the “mother of our Bible women and also the mother of our Bible schools.”19
On the surface, Adele Fielde had much in common with another unmarried Baptist woman from America who arrived in China in 1873, the very same year that she did (though she had been serving in Thailand previously). In a letter to this other woman, H.A. Tupper, secretary for the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, had written: “I estimate a single woman in China is worth two married men.”20 On the average that may have been true, but few could have argued—then or now—that Adele Fielde and Lottie Moon combined were “worth” more than four married men.
Lottie Moon was one of the most prominent missionary activists of the nineteenth century. Her impact on missions—particularly Southern Baptist missions—was enormous. Indeed, she is sometimes referred to as the “patron saint” of Baptist missions. And that remains true today. “No one—missionary, pastor, or denominational leader,” writes Alan Neely, “is as powerful a symbol in Southern Baptist circles as Lottie Moon. Her name is a mission shibboleth. Her life epitomizes foreign missions.”21
Charlotte (“Lottie”) Moon was born in 1840 into an old Virginia family of Albemarle County and grew up on Viewmont, a tobacco plantation near three famous presidential homes—Monticello, Montpelier, and Ashlawn. She was one of seven children and was deeply influenced by the staunch faith, ambitious drive, and independence of their mother, who was widowed in 1852. Her oldest brother became a respected physician, and her sister Orianna, also a physician (and reputedly the first female doctor south of the Mason-Dixon line), served as a missionary in Palestine until the outbreak of the Civil War and then returned home to serve as a medical doctor in the Confederate Army.
Like her brothers and sisters, Moon was well educated and cultured. During her college years she rebelled against her strict Baptist upbringing, but a campus revival changed her life: “I went to the service to scoff, and returned to my room to pray all night.” After college she went home to help run Viewmont while other family members, both male and female, “marched out to fight for the Stars and Bars,” performing “splendid service” as spies and elite guerrilla soldiers. Moon was left out of the excitement, and it was this vacuum, according to Irwin Hyatt, “that would eventually send her to China.”22
Following the war, Moon pursued a teaching career, but she desired ministry and adventure beyond what her little school in Cartersville, Georgia, offered. Unlike so many women, she did not feel deterred by her sex. The strong women in her family who had performed as “doctors, executives, and spies,” according to Hyatt, “further demonstrated what determined females could do.” In 1872 Lottie’s sister Edmonia sailed for China, and in 1873, she followed.23
Edmonia Moon’s tenure in China was short. She was only in her late teens when she sailed for China and was unable to cope with the pressures of missionary life. Besides physical ailments, she suffered from seizures and, according to coworkers, did “queer and unreasonable things” and was “very burdensome” to the missionary community. Even her sister was exasperated by her “good for nothing” behavior, and finally, in 1877, after four years in China, she returned home to Virginia. Although her departure freed Moon from the drudgery of being her sister’s nursemaid and allowed her to actively participate in missionary work, it also plunged her into a period of depression. To her home committee she wrote: “I especially am bored to death living alone. I don’t find my own society either agreeable or edifying…. I really think a few more winters like the one just past would put an end to me. This is no joke, but dead earnest.”24
Loneliness, however, was not the only factor frustrating her ministry in China. Crawford Toy, a Confederate Army chaplain who had first “come a-wooing” while she was living at Viewmont following the war, had entered her life again. Now teaching at a Southern Baptist seminary in South Carolina, he talked of marriage and suggested they work as a missionary team in Japan. It was a tempting offer but one that Lottie reluctantly refused. While the prospect of going to Japan appealed to her, there were other factors to consider. Toy, “influenced by the new ideas of the German scholars,” also held to the Darwinian theory of evolution, a view that had already created controversy for him within the Southern Baptist Convention. Moon was aware of his position, and after studying the subject she concluded that evolution was an “untenable position.” She broke off their relationship. Years later, when asked if she had ever had a love affair, she responded, “Yes, but God had first claim on my life, and since the two conflicted, there could be no question about the result.” Toy later became a professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages at Harvard University, and Moon, in her own words, was left to “plod along in the same old way.”25
If Moon had hoped that coming to China would allow her to have a ministry comparable to that of a man, she was mistaken. The Southern Baptists had distinct roles for women, according to Catherine Allen:
Moon’s assignment in China was “women’s work.” This title denoted two philosophies that shaped her ministry and her world. First was the missionary strategy known as “woman’s mission to woman.” Second was the staunchly defended prohibition against women seeming to teach, preach, or exercise authority over men.26
Moon’s work in China continued to be drudgery, and the romantic ideal of missionary work had long since faded. As a cultured “Southern belle,” she found it difficult to identify with the Chinese people, and as a teacher she found it almost impossible to penetrate their “dull” minds. Had she really given up her thriving school in Cartersville, Georgia, for this? She had come to China to “go out among the millions” as an evangelist, only to find herself chained to a school of forty “unstudious” children. Relegating women to such roles, she charged, was “the greatest folly of modern missions.” “Can we wonder,” she fumed, “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.” “What women want who come to China,” she insisted, “is free opportunity to do the largest possible work…. What women have a right to demand is perfect equality.”27
Such a view was a radical position for a female missionary—especially when published in missionary magazines. There was immediate reaction, particularly by those who found such signs of female liberation “repulsive.” One such response came from one of her colleagues, a Mrs. Arthur Smith, wife of a Congregational missionary to China, who suggested Moon was mentally unbalanced for craving such “lawless prancing all over the mission lot.” Mrs. Smith argued that the proper role of a female missionary was to attend “with a quivering lip” her own children.28
With no children of her own, Moon was determined to expand her ministry to fit her own concept of fulfillment. She began traveling out into the country villages, and by 1885 she concluded that her ministry would be more effective if she were to move to Pingtu and begin a new work there on her own. Besides her desire to be involved full-time in evangelistic work, she wanted to get out from under the high-handed authority of her field director, T. P. Crawford. His philosophy of missions did not allow for mission schools, so Lottie’s teaching ministry was in jeopardy anyway, and his dictatorial methods of dealing with other missionaries had even alienated his own wife. Moreover, she feared that under his authority single women missionaries might be relegated to the place of Presbyterian women missionaries, who had no vote in their mission, and she threatened to resign over this very issue. “Simple justice,” she insisted, “demands that women should have equal rights with men in mission meetings and in the conduct of their work.” She wrote to the home board, criticizing Crawford and his new plan of operation (including the closing of schools and the “regulation of mission salaries”) and concluded with the terse comment, “If that be freedom, give me slavery!”29
Moon’s critical remarks were not those of a heady adolescent. She was forty-four years old and a twelve-year veteran of China missions, and she justifiably resented the lack of choices women were allowed. But her move to Pingtu did not solve all her problems. Pioneer evangelism was extremely difficult work. The cries of “woman devil” followed her as she walked down the narrow village streets. Only slowly and after weary persistence did she win friends among the women, and even then it was difficult to make an impact on women until she had won the confidence of the men.
Her first opportunity to reach Chinese men came in 1887, when three strangers from a nearby village appeared at her door in Pingtu. They had heard the “new doctrine” being whispered about by the women and were eager for her to tell them more. She visited their village, where she found “something I had never seen before in China. Such eagerness to learn! Such spiritual desires!” So excited was she that she canceled plans for a long-overdue furlough and summoned Martha Crawford, the wife of her field director, to come and help her. Their efforts were rewarded. She wrote home, “Surely there can be no deeper joy than that of saving souls.” Despite local opposition, she established a church, and in 1889 the first baptisms were conducted by an ordained Baptist missionary. The church grew, and within two decades, under her policy of keeping “the movement as free from foreign interference as possible,” Li Shou Ting, the Chinese pastor, baptized more than a thousand converts, and Pingtu had become the “greatest” Southern Baptist “evangelistic center … in all China.”30
Between 1890 and her death in 1912, Moon lived two separate lives in China. Part of the year was spent in villages doing evangelistic work, and the other part was spent in Tengchow, where she trained new missionaries, counseled Chinese women, and enjoyed her Western books and magazines. She continued to write articles that paved the way for her extraordinary influence among the Southern Baptists. Although she returned home on furloughs and occasionally spoke before large audiences, it was chiefly her pen that stirred the hearts of Baptist women in the South.
Most of her writing appealed for greater support of foreign missions and for more recruits, sometimes taunting the men. “It is odd,” she wrote, “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.” But if the men would not come to the rescue of foreign missionary work, women would have to. The China missionary work of the Southern Methodists had almost collapsed before it was rescued by “enlisting of the women.” And if Methodist women could save their foreign missionary program, so also could Baptist women.31
She called for a week of prayer and a special Christmas offering to be handled solely by women and to be directed exclusively toward missions. She also appealed for “vigorous healthy women” to come to China. The first Christmas offering in 1888, according to Hyatt, “exceeded its goal by a thousand dollars, enough to pay for three new ladies instead of two.” Moon responded with enthusiasm: “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 … a mighty wave of enthusiasm for Woman’s Work for Woman must be stirred.”32
In the years that followed, the Christmas offering increased and there were more single women to serve in China, but the early years of the twentieth century following the Boxer uprising were devastating times in China. Outbreaks of the plague and smallpox, followed by famine, and then a local uprising in 1911 brought mass starvation to the region. She organized a relief service and pleaded for funds from the United States, but the board, unable to meet other financial obligations, declined assistance. She contributed from her personal funds, but her efforts seemed trifling in the face of such tragedy.
With the last of her savings drawn from her small bank account, she lapsed into depression—no doubt due in part to the fact that her sister Edmonia had, while lying in bed, “put a gun to her head” and ended her life.33 She quit eating, and her health declined. A doctor was sent for, and only then was it discovered that she was starving to death. Arrangements were made for her to return home in the company of a nurse, but it was too late. She died aboard ship while at port in Kobe, Japan, on Christmas Eve 1912, one week after her seventy-second birthday.
What she could not do in life, she accomplished in death. In the years that followed, the “Lottie Moon Christmas Offering” increased, and the Lottie Moon story was repeated over and over again. By 1925 the offerings had surpassed three hundred thousand dollars, and by the last decades of the twentieth century, more than twenty million dollars was collected annually. For Southern Baptist women, she had become a symbol of true womanhood and of what women could accomplish for missions. The highest compliment the Foreign Missions Journal could pay her at the time of her death was to say she was “the best man among our missionaries.”34
Probably the only woman missionary whose fame exceeded that of Lottie Moon in the early twentieth century was Amy Carmichael. She served in India for fifty-five years, from 1895 to her death in 1951. During that time she founded Dohnavur Fellowship and wrote some thirty-five books, a number of which were translated into more than a dozen languages. One of them, Gold Cord, has had sales of more than a half-million. She founded a religious order, the Sisters of the Common Life, made up primarily of Indian women, who along with Carmichael pledged themselves to celibacy and sacrificial ministry. To many people she was a living saint. Sherwood Eddy, a missionary statesman and author, was impressed by the “beauty of her character”; and character, according to Eddy, was the key to successful world evangelism. “Here is the point where many a missionary breaks down. Every normal missionary sails with high purpose but as a very imperfect Christian…. His character is his weakest point…. [But] Amy Wilson Carmichael was the most Christlike character I ever met, and … her life was the most fragrant, the most joyfully sacrificial, that I ever knew.”35
Amy Carmichael was born in 1867 into a well-to-do North Ireland family whose little village of Millisle was dominated by the prosperous Carmichael flour mills. She lived a carefree life until her father died when she was eighteen and, as the oldest of seven children, heavy responsibility fell on her shoulders. Her father had left the family in severe financial straits, and soon afterward they moved to Belfast. Here Carmichael was introduced to city mission work and the “deeper life theology” of “victorious living.”Then came her call to missions.
In 1892 Carmichael heard the words “Go ye” as her missionary call, and one year later, at the age of twenty-four, she was in Japan. But the Japanese language seemed impossible to her, and the missionary community was not the picture of harmony she had envisioned. To her mother she wrote, “We are here just what we are at home—not one bit better—and the devil is awfully busy…. There are missionary shipwrecks of once fair vessels.” Her health was also a problem. To Sherwood Eddy she later confided that she had “broken down from nervous prostration during the very first year of … service, suffering, as some foreigners do, from what was called Japanese head.” “The climate,” she had written her mother, “is dreadful upon the brain.”36
Amy Carmichael, founder of Dohnavur Fellowship in India.
After fifteen months in Japan she departed. Without even notifying the Keswick Convention, the mainstay of her support, she sailed for Ceylon. Her explanation was simple: “I simply say that I left Japan for rest and change, that when at Shanghai I believed the Lord told me to follow Him down to Ceylon, and so I came.”37 After a short time she left Ceylon and returned home. But after less than a year in the British Isles, she was back in Asia—this time in India, where she would remain for more than fifty-five years without a furlough.
Carmichael’s ministry was primarily one that reached out to children—child widows, temple prostitutes, and orphans. Her compound, Dohnavur Fellowship, became a center for humanitarian services. By 1913, twelve years after she began her ministry, she had 130 children under her care, and in the decades that followed, hundreds more found a home at Dohnavur.
Dohnavur Fellowship was a unique Christian ministry. The members wore Indian dress and lived communally. To critics who accused her of focusing too much on humanitarian activities, she responded, “One cannot save and then pitchfork souls into heaven…. Souls are more or less securely fastened to bodies.”38
Years before, while in Japan, she had dealt with the matter of singleness. It was a difficult struggle and one that she was unable to write about for more than forty years—and even then she only shared it privately with one of her “children,” whom she was admonishing to follow the same course:
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’s 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. It has been fulfilled to me. It will be fulfilled to you.39
That others should follow her in forsaking marriage and a family was to Carmichael both a practical and spiritual commitment. The ministry needed staff who would serve as mothers and spiritual counselors to the children. That led her to form the Sisters of the Common Life for single women.
Carmichael insisted—at least outwardly—that reports of the work not be embellished. She was criticized for her book Things as They Are because it gave a negative perspective of missions: “It is more important that you should know about the reverses than about the successes of the war. We shall have all eternity to celebrate the victories, but we have only the few hours before sunset in which to win them…. So we have tried to tell you the truth—the uninteresting, unromantic truth.”40
But as forthright as Carmichael was about the difficulties and downside of mission outreach, she was very careful to shield from public view any negative aspects of her private life or of life inside Dohnavur Fellowship. She was also concerned that Dohnavur might become contaminated with the outside world. “O to be delivered from half-hearted missionaries!” she wrote. “Don’t come if you mean to turn aside for anything—for the ‘claims of society.’… Don’t come if you haven’t made up your mind to live for one thing—the winning of souls.” She insisted that those who worked with her not associate with other missionaries. Even when taking a rest at a retreat house in the hills, “you had to be insulated there from other missionary ideas and certainly from the rest of the European community.”41
Her individualism and eccentricity are seen in her autobiographical writing. In one story, she tells about riding her horse wildly. “Oh, that you could see us as we tear along,” she wrote. “We are called the mad riders of Kotagiri.” While riding along a road, they came upon a group of people, including the retiring Anglican bishop, the new bishop, his wife, and “various old ladies.” The people “parted with alacrity as we shot through, and we caught a fleeting glance at the gaze of astonishment and horror.”There is a tone of contempt as she concludes her story: “Once I ran over a man. I did not mean to—he wouldn’t get out of the way and one can’t stop short in mid-gallop.”42
Another aspect of her separation from the world was her “Victorian sensitivities”—though the Victorian era was ending as she was beginning her mission work in India. The most extreme form of modesty reigned over Dohnavur. So offended by the English word leg was she, writes Elisabeth Elliot, that “even the doctors found themselves inserting [the Tamil word] kaal into an English sentence when it was necessary to refer to that unspeakable limb.” And despite the medical work conducted at Dohnavur, “a missionary who worked with her many years later insisted that Amy not only did not then know the truth about sex, but never learned.”43
Carmichael was a hard taskmaster. When those who worked with her “raised the question of furlough or even just a weekend off,” they were denied the request. Even the nature of the ministry was rigidly guarded. When an elderly Indian coworker, Saral, asked if she could teach Hindu women how to knit with some pink wool yarn she had been given, Carmichael explained that “the Gospel needed no such frills.” The woman “protested that there was nothing in the Bible which bore upon pink wool and knitting needles.” But Carmichael insisted there was. She quoted Zechariah 4:6 (KJV), “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.”44
She had utter contempt for non-Christian religious practices. Once while walking in the hills with Saral, they came upon three stones under a tree, which Saral identified as “heathen idols.” Carmichael was incensed: “To see those stupid stones standing there to the honor of the false gods, in the midst of the true God’s beauty, was too much for us. We knocked them over and down they crashed.” She also took a militant stance against Hinduism when it related to evangelism. Speaking of a high-caste woman who she hoped would openly express interest in the gospel, Carmichael responded: “If so, we shall be in the very thick of the fight again—Hallelujah!” Regarding another such woman, she wrote, “Will God move in [her] heart so that she will dare her husband’s fury and the knife he flashed before her eyes? If so, our bungalow will be in the very teeth of the storm, angry men all around it, and we inside, kept by the power of God.”45
Not surprisingly, other missionaries strongly disapproved of her approach. “There arose during the early years of the Dohnavur work,” writes Elliot, “a fairly strong ‘Get-Amy-Carmichael-out-of-India’ movement among missionaries and Indian Christians.” As the years passed, she was more often ignored than opposed by other missionaries. But the criticism continued. “Someone suggested that her efforts to save temple children were nothing more than a stunt, meant to draw attention to herself…. She was a dictator, she opposed marriage, her Indian girls worshipped her.”46
Carmichael believed she was divinely directed in her work and her decision making. “Our Master … demands obedience,” she wrote, and it was her duty to obey the instructions. “Sometimes the Spirit of Jesus gave a direct command…. Sometimes an angel was sent, sometimes a vision…. In the end our God justifies His commands.”47
Carmichael was accused by some of being a dictator—particularly some of those who came to Dohnavur to work with her, including the Neill family, who arrived in 1924—the parents, both physicians; their daughter; and their son Stephen, a recent graduate of Cambridge. Within six months after their arrival, the elder Neills had severed their ties with Dohnavur, but Stephen continued on for more than a year. Carmichael was impressed with his brilliance—particularly his quick grasp of the language, but she resented his efforts to change things God had already ordained. He introduced interscholastic athletics, bringing Dohnavur boys in contact with “the outside.” This she viewed as perilous. In other ways he sought to bring Dohnavur closer to the missionary community, but she feared contamination.48
The stormy relationship continued until November 28, 1925, when, according to Elliot, Stephen Neill was dismissed from Dohnavur. For Carmichael it was “one of the saddest nights of my life.”There had previously been an altercation that caused “a dreadful time of distress.” She wrote in her diary: “Never such known before. I am beginning to sink. Lord, save me.” A year after Neill left Dohnavur, she wrote to a friend: “I long over him still, miss him and want him and long to be one in affection. The scab is not even beginning to skin over. It’s just red raw.”49
From Neill’s perspective, this period of time was equally distressing, as he confessed in his autobiography: “During that first year, fellow Christians had brought into my life such darkness and suffering that it took me many years to recover from the injuries, and the scars are still there.”50 Neill recalled his initial meeting with her as “an impression of power”—that not even the “smallest disagreement” was permitted. Those who came to Dohnavur found it to be a “myth.” The compound was thoroughly separated from the surrounding area and “flooded with Europeans.” He later confessed, “I gave my whole soul to Dohnavur,” but his time spent there only brought him lifelong wounds.51 “Some of the experiences of my first year in India,” he writes, “were so excessively painful that by January 1926 the darkness was complete. A year in England helped, but this time of trouble did not really clear itself up until 1933.”52
Neill went on to write dozens of books, most notably A History of Christian Missions, and he served for many years as the Anglican Bishop of Tinnevelly—the district that included Dohnavur, though by that time Carmichael had severed her ties with the Anglican Church.
Though her final twenty years (following a serious fall) were spent as an invalid, Carmichael continued to write books and to plead for the cause of her “dear children.” She died at Dohnavur in 1951 at the age of eighty-three.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of single women in missions was the status the profession conferred to otherwise very ordinary individuals. This was also true in certain cases with men, but not to such a great extent. A man had to excel. He had to attain some kind of distinction in his missionary service to be rated a “missionary hero,” but a woman could became a heroine just by having the courage to strike out on her own and go to a distant land. This was true of Johanna Veenstra, in many ways representative of the vast army of single women who went abroad after the turn of the twentieth century, who was repeatedly referred to as a “heroine” by her admiring biographer (Henry Beets, Director of Missions of the Christian Reformed Church). An obscure stenographer turned celebrity in Christian Reformed circles, she was in many ways very ordinary. Her life, however, sheds light on the sacrifice as well as the expectations placed on her and her fellow “heroines” of the faith.
Veenstra was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1894, two years before her father left his carpentry trade to train for ministry. But only months after completing his ministerial training and beginning his pastoral ministry, he contracted typhoid fever and died. His death brought hardship and poverty to the widow and her six small children. She returned to Paterson where she opened a general store. Johanna attended Christian schools until she was twelve and then trained to become a secretary. At the age of fourteen she became a stenographer in New York City, commuting every day from Paterson.
Johanna was active in her Christian Reformed church, but it was while attending a Baptist church that she underwent a religious experience that sparked her interest in missions. At the age of nineteen she enrolled at the Union Missionary Training Institute in New York City and then applied to the Sudan United Mission (SUM) for missionary service in Africa. Mission policy, however, required candidates to be twenty-five, so in the interim she took further schooling at Calvin College, where she became the first woman member of the Student Volunteer Board. Before sailing to Africa, she returned to New York for medical training and graduated from the midwifery course.
Veenstra’s assignment under the SUM involved pioneer work at Lupwe, not far from Calabar (where Mary Slessor had served some years earlier). The station at Lupwe was new and consisted only of a few unfinished and unfurnished huts with dirt floors, but she adjusted to the very primitive conditions quickly—or at least gave that impression when writing home: “When having my evening meal, here were those creatures, in swarms, sticking fast in hand, dropping in the food—and I concluded a plague was upon us. There was no ‘shutting’ them out because in these native huts we have no ceiling.”The rats, too, were bothersome, but she did not complain. God had called her. “There has never been a single regret that I left the ‘bright lights and gay life’ of NewYork City, and came to this dark corner of his vineyard. There has been no sacrifice, because the Lord Jesus Himself is my constant companion,” she wrote.53
Johanna Veenstra, Christian Reformed missionary to Africa.
One of her first projects was to set up a boarding school to train young men as evangelists. It was an all-consuming project, but she found time for medical and evangelistic work. Sometimes her treks into neighboring villages lasted for several weeks at a time. There were rarely outward professions of faith. Just obtaining an attentive audience was a major sign of success. But if on “rare occasions” she witnessed “people weep as they were hearing the story of the death of our Lord” and “gasp with wonder and clap their hands in gratitude to God for His gifts,” there were “very discouraging” times too:
I took one trek through the hills, walking from place to place for nine days…. We planned to stay over Sunday at a certain village but it proved that we were not welcome. They did not want to provide food for the carriers and the others who were with me. So they suffered a good deal of hunger. Rain hindered the people coming to meetings. I sat at a hut door, with an umbrella to keep me dry, while the people were huddled together inside the hut about a fire. On Sunday afternoon a heavy thunderstorm arose. The rain came down in torrents. The hut where I camped was a grass-walled one, and the rain came rushing in until the whole place was flooded…. Early the next morning we started off for a long walk to another hill…. The chief was at home, but he was sick. We stopped here one night, and decided to go home. How glad we were to see our Lupwe compound.54
Veenstra’s usual means for traveling from village to village was a bicycle, but it was slow and very tiring pedaling uphill in rough terrain, especially considering her tendency toward portliness. She secretly envied some of the male missionaries who were moving about in relative ease on their motorcycles, so after her second furlough in 1927 she returned to Africa with a new motorcycle. Her matronly appearance no doubt made for a curious sight as she began her motorized journey inland over the bumpy trails, but no one could question her pluck. Despite her initial enthusiasm and determination, she soon discovered that “dirtbiking” was not her niche. Less than forty miles out, she unexpectedly hit sand and was thrown from the bike. Badly bruised in body and spirit, she sent for help and resigned herself to go back to pedaling.
Although she willingly lived in a native hut and accepted the Africans for who they were, she entered their world with a spirit of domination. “It is necessary,” she wrote, “that the missionary continually hold an attitude of superiority. Not in the sense of ‘we are better than you.’ God forbid! But rather in the sense of claiming and using authority. The missionary must prove himself or herself to be ‘boss’ (not bossy), commanding and demanding obedience.”55 This kind of paternalism (or maternalism in this case) was the norm, and she as much as any missionary was a product of her generation. But such attitudes nevertheless contributed to the bitter animosities that led to violent revolution in that part of the world only a few decades later.
But during the 1920s and 30s, while she was pouring her life into Africa, there seemed to be little evidence of resentment. Her medical work was particularly appreciated, and it was considered a privilege to attend her boarding school. It was thus a great sorrow to the people of Lupwe and neighboring villages when they received word of their missionary’s untimely death in 1933. She had entered a mission hospital for what was thought to be routine surgery, but she never recovered.
Back home the news was received by her family and friends with disbelief and sorrow. But they were God-fearing Christian Reformed people who never questioned God’s sovereignty in such matters. Their “heroine” had merely been promoted to a higher position and was now enjoying far greater riches than she so willingly relinquished on earth. Ironically, a letter that arrived from her after her death, though written about an African Christian who had died, was titled appropriately for Veenstra herself: “From a Mudhut to a Mansion on High.”56
If sex discrimination had been a factor in the past for women who had been denied missionary appointments, this was not the case with Gladys Aylward. She applied to the China Inland Mission (a mission with a longstanding reputation for its acceptance of women) in 1930 only to be turned down after a probationary term at the mission’s training center. She simply was not missionary material. At twenty-eight, her age was not in her favor, but the primary reason for rejecting her was her poor academic showing—which may have been caused by a profound learning disability. Although she was bright conversationally, book learning seemed impossible for her. She studied as hard as the other students, but according to one biographer, “when it came to imbibing knowledge by normally accepted methods, Gladys’s powers of mental digestion seemed automatically to go into neutral, and occasionally reverse.”57 But despite this handicap, she became one of the most noted single woman missionaries in modern history.
She was born in London in 1902 into a working-class family, and it was among that segment of society that she seemed doomed to carry out her existence. She entered the workforce at the age of fourteen and settled into a life of domestic service. She was a parlor maid, a genteel term for a house servant—a position that included heavy chores, long hours, and low pay—and a job that trapped some single women for the whole of their lives. The days were routine and dull, and the occasional nights off were cut short by an early curfew. Only in her fantasies did she break out of her drab existence. Here she moved in fast circles—drinking, smoking, dancing, gambling, and attending theaters.
This combination of fantasy and reality dominated Aylward in her twenties and perhaps would have continued on into her thirties and beyond but for a significant change in her life. Although she had attended church occasionally, it was not until she was confronted by a stranger that she made profession of faith. With her conversion, her life changed, and she began dreaming about being a missionary. This dream brought her to the CIM headquarters in 1929, and the dream did not die when she was denied candidacy after her probationary term was over. She was convinced that God was calling her, and if she could not obtain a mission’s sponsorship she would go on her own.
So alone in her little bedroom, once again employed as a parlor maid, she began planning for mission work in China. She began depositing all her scant savings with the ticket agent at the railway station. (Rail passage through Europe, Russia, and Siberia was the cheapest transportation available.) She also began reading and inquiring about China, which brought her in contact with Jeannie Lawson, an elderly widowed China missionary who was eager to have assistance. For Aylward that was a direct sign from God, and on October 15, 1932, tickets in hand, she departed from the Liverpool Street Station en route to China.
Bundled up in an orange frock worn over a coat, she was a curious looking traveler, resembling a gypsy more than a missionary. Besides her bedroll, she carried suitcases (one stocked with food) and a bag clanking with a small stove and pots and pans. Despite the language barriers, her trip through Europe was relatively uneventful. Russia, however, was in the midst of an undeclared border war with China, and after passing through Moscow the train was packed with Russian troops. At every stop the validity of her tickets and passport was questioned.
Alone with hundreds of soldiers, crossing the stark Siberian landscape, she had second thoughts about her decision, but it was too late to turn back. Finally, the monotony of the train clanging along the frozen tracks ended. Without warning, she was told that she had gone as far as she would be allowed to travel. Only soldiers were allowed to stay on the train. She refused to get off, thinking that every mile was bringing her closer to China. The train continued several miles down the track, and then it stopped again. The sound of gunfire could be heard in the distance as the soldiers and supplies were unloaded. She found herself all alone in a deserted train only hundreds of yards away from the war zone. She had no choice but to trudge back on the snow-covered tracks to Chita. Her biographer, Alan Burgess, vividly recounts the ordeal:
The Siberian wind blew the powdered snow around her heels, and she carried a suitcase in each hand, one still decorated ludicrously with kettle and saucepan. Around her shoulders she wore the fur rug. And so she trudged off into the night, a slight, lonely figure, dwarfed by the tall, somber trees, the towering mountains, and the black sky, diamond bright with stars. There were wolves near by, but this she did not know. Occasionally in the forest a handful of snow would slither to the ground with a sudden noise, or a branch would crack under the weight of snow, and she would pause and peer uncertainly in that direction. But nothing moved. There was no light, no warmth, nothing but endless loneliness.58
By dawn, after having taken a two-hour rest next to her little alcohol stove, she could see the lights of Chita in the distance. The worst ordeal of her journey was over. From Chita she was able to get rail passage into Manchuria, but even then she was able to get into China only by making an unscheduled trip to Japan, where she received help from the British consul.
Once in China, she began the arduous trek across the mountains to Yangcheng, where Jeannie Lawson was faithfully continuing the work she and her husband had begun so many years earlier. Lawson welcomed her, but in her own way. She was a brusque woman who was not impressed by any sacrifice that Aylward had endured. After being shown around, Aylward was assigned the work of being a missionary—operating an inn for muleteers who passed through Yangcheng on their route west. For Lawson it was an opportunity to share the gospel with the muleteers each evening, but for Aylward it was hard work—making her domestic work back in London seem like a genteel profession.
Gladys Aylward, shortly after her arrival in China.
Despite the hard work and few rewards, this was an opportunity for her to become immersed in the culture. What she never could have learned in formal language training, she was readily picking up as she dealt with the muleteers. The Chinese tongue was not just a language of complex written characters, but a language of emotion and feeling, and it was through this facet of the language that she learned to communicate. But if she was making progress in communicating with the Chinese, she was regressing in her ability to communicate with Lawson—if, in fact, they ever had truly communicated. Lawson’s set ways and Aylward’s independent spirit clashed, and finally, after a heated argument (less than a year after her arrival), Aylward was ordered to leave. With nowhere else to go, she moved in with some CIM missionaries in another town; but when word came some time later that Lawson was ill, she rushed back to be at her side and cared for her until she died several weeks later.
With the death of Lawson, she no longer had the financial support needed to operate the inn, but a new opportunity opened up—one that gave her a far wider influence. She was asked by the Chinese magistrate of Yangcheng to become the local foot inspector. It became her job to go from house to house, making sure the new laws against female foot-binding were being upheld. It was an exciting opportunity for her to improve her language skills, to get to know the people, and to share the gospel.
As she traveled around, her ministry blossomed. Wherever she went, people came out to see her and to listen to her Bible stories. As she visited and revisited villages, her prestige grew, and the people began to view her as an authority figure—so much so that on one occasion she was called on to use her prowess to put down a prison riot. She made friends and converts, and the future for her ministry seemed bright. But outside her little world around Yangcheng in the Shansi Province, massive plots and military maneuvers were taking place. The yet-obscure guerrilla leader Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) was building his revolutionary force, and Japan was amassing thousands of troops on the Manchurian border.
But life went on inYangcheng as usual until the summer of 1937 when the once-peaceful mountain villages of Shansi suddenly became targets of Japanese bombing raids. Aylward, who had recently become a Chinese citizen, stayed on; and in the spring of 1938, when Yangcheng itself was bombed, she refused to leave until the last casualties were accounted for.
The war had a profound effect on her. On the one hand, it brought courage and physical endurance that she herself did not recognize. She moved behind enemy lines, bringing supplies and assistance to villagers, and served so effectively as a spy for the Chinese military that there was a price on her head. But on the other hand, the ravages of war made her realize how very alone and vulnerable she really was. To those around her she was strong, but deep down inside she longed for a husband.
Marriage was something that she had never ruled out. Even before the war she had prayed for a husband and dreamed that one day her Prince Charming might come walking into Yangcheng. He never came—at least the one of her fantasies. But the war did bring another man into her life. His name was Linnen, a Chinese military officer—the man who convinced her to become a spy against the Japanese. At first it was mutual patriotism that brought them together, but as time passed a romantic relationship developed, and as the suffering and hardships of war increased, her desire for marriage and security grew more intense. She wrote home to her family in England that she was planning to marry him. But the marriage never took place. In the devastated, war-torn countryside nothing short of death seemed certain, and plans were made to be broken.
There were others who needed her love and attention more than Linnen. She had children to care for. Ninepence was her first child—a tiny abandoned girl she had purchased for that amount. As the years passed she “adopted” more, and in addition to her own, there were dozens of war orphans that depended on her for sustenance. This overwhelming responsibility loomed above all else, impelling her to leave Shansi with her brood of nearly one hundred children in the spring of 1940 and to cross the mountains and theYellow River (the Huang) into safety beyond the border.
The journey was a harrowing one. Enemy troops were never far away, and moving unnoticed with nearly one hundred noisy children was a constant emotional strain. When at last they reached their destination, she collapsed from mental and physical exhaustion, and the children were scattered in refugee housing. After months of care by a missionary couple, Aylward slowly regained her strength, but mentally she remained impaired—suffering hallucinations and wandering around the village unable to find her way home. But as the months passed, the period of mental confusion decreased, and she was able once again to reestablish contact with her scattered children and minister to others.
By 1943, with the Japanese retreating, she was back again in China, living with CIM missionaries. But she was restless and moved on, finally settling in Chengtu, where she eventually became employed by a local church as a Bible woman—a role heretofore reserved for native Chinese women. Yet that lowly position was one she accepted with honor, serving the church in evangelism and charity work.
In 1949, after nearly twenty years in China, she was persuaded to make a visit home, and during that furlough the “small woman” of China won her way into the hearts of the British people. Ill at ease in Western culture, she would have preferred to remain in the background, but her mother, serving as her daughter’s agent, had different ideas for her. For many years her mother had eagerly accepted speaking invitations to deliver her one and only address, “Our Gladys in China.” And now that her daughter had returned home, she proudly introduced her to her audiences.
In the years that followed, through a popular biography (The Small Woman by Alan Burgess), a film (The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman), and a This isYour Life feature on BBC, Aylward became an international celebrity. Though she returned to minister and make her home in Taiwan in 1957, she continued her world travel and was never out of the limelight, speaking in such places as the Hollywood First Presbyterian Church and dining with such dignitaries as Queen Elizabeth.
Yet through all the service she had rendered and the fame she had acquired, she was never fully secure in her calling—particularly that God really wanted to entrust a woman with the responsibilities he had given her. In an interview during her later years, she confided her doubts to a friend: “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.”59
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Catherine. The New Lottie Moon Story. Nashville: Broadman, 1980.
Beaver, R. Pierce. American Protestant Women in World Mission. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969.
Beets, Henry. Johanna of Nigeria: Life and Labors of Johanna Veenstra. Grand Rapids: Grand Rapids Printing Company, 1937.
Burgess, Alan. The Small Woman. New York: Dutton, 1957.
Elliot, Elisabeth. A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael. Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1987.
Houghton, Frank. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur. London: Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, 1954.
Hyatt, Irwin. “Charlotte Diggs Moon.” In Our Ordered Lives Confess: Three Nineteenth-Century American Missionaries in East Shantung. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.
Robert, Dana. American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996.
Stevens, Helen N. Memorial Biography of Adele M. Fielde: Humanitarian. New York: Fielde Memorial Committee, 1918.
Thompson, Phyllis, A Transparent Woman: The Compelling Story of Gladys Aylward. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1971.
Tucker, Ruth A. Guardians of the Great Commission: The Story of Women in Modern Missions. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988.
Veenstra, Johanna. Pioneering for Christ in the Sudan. Grand Rapids: Smitter Book, 1926.
Warren, Leonard. Adele Marion Fielde: Feminist, Social Activist, Scientist. New York: Routledge, 2002.