American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and PracticeThe stereotype of the woman missionary has ranged from that of the longsuffering wife, characterized by the epitaph Died, given over to hospitality, to that of the spinster in her unstylish dress and wire-rimmed glasses, alone somewhere for thirty years teaching heathen children. Like all caricatures, those of the exhausted wife and frustrated old maid carry some truth: the underlying message of the sterotypes is that missionary women were perceived as marginal to the central tasks of mission. Rather than being remembered for preaching the gospel, the quintessential male task, missionary women were noted for meeting human needs and helping others, sacrificing themselves without plan or reason, all for the sake of bringing the world to Jesus Christ.Historical evidence, however, gives lie to the truism that women missionaries were and are doers but not thinkers, reactive secondary figures rather than proactive primary ones. The first American women to serve as foreign missionaries in 1812 were among the best-educated women of their time. Although barred from obtaining the college education or ministerial credentials of their husbands, the early missionary wives had read their Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins. Not only did they go abroad with particular theologies to share, but their identities as women caused them to develop gender-based mission theories. Early nineteenth-century women seldom wrote theologies of mission, but they wrote letters and kept journals that reveal a thought world and set of assumptions about women's roles in the missionary task. The activities of missionary wives were not random: they were part of a mission strategy that gave women a particular role inthe advancement of the reign of God.By moving from mission field to mission field in chronological order of missionary presence, Robert charts missiological developments as they took place in dialogue with the urgent context of the day. Each case study marks the beginning of the mission theory. Baptist women in Burma, for example, are only considered in their first decades there and are not traced into the present. Robert believes that at this early stage of research into women's mission theory, integrity and analysis lies more in a succession of contextualized case studies than in gross generalizations. |
Contents
| xxi | |
| 2 | |
| 22 | |
| 34 | |
| 37 | |
Martyr or Failure? | 46 |
3 Baptist Wives in Burma | 49 |
4 American Board Wives in Hawaii | 54 |
3 Women in Holiness Missions | 229 |
4 Women Missionaries and Early Pentecostal Missiology | 238 |
5 Evangelism and Gender | 251 |
Chapter VI The Ecumenical Womans Missionary Movement | 253 |
2 The Missiology of World Friendship | 270 |
3 The Decline of the Womans Missionary Movement | 300 |
Chapter VII The Emergence of Missionary Sisters | 315 |
1 America as a Mission Field | 316 |
5 Cultural Context and the Creation of Mission Theories | 73 |
Chapter III The Missionary teacher | 79 |
1 The Evolution of the Mission Boarding School | 81 |
2 Mary Lyon and the Systematization of Missionary Preparation | 90 |
3 The Collapse of the LyonAnderson Consensus | 112 |
4 The Missionary Teacher Comes of Age | 122 |
Womans Work for Woman and the Methodist Episcopal Church | 123 |
Womans Work for Woman | 128 |
2 The Mission and Missionaries of the Womans Foreign Missionary Society | 135 |
3 The Womans Foreign Missionary Society in China | 168 |
4 A Womans Theory for World Conversion | 186 |
Chapter V Women and Independent Evangelical Missions | 187 |
1 Women and the Emergence of Faith Missions | 190 |
Women of the Africa Inland Mission | 203 |
2 The Founding of Womens Foreign Mission Communities | 333 |
3 The Society for the Propagation of the Faith and the Americanization of Catholic Missions | 341 |
Mary Josephine Rogers and the Foreign Mission Sisters of St Dominic | 347 |
5 The Mission Motivations of American Catholic Women | 358 |
Chapter VIII From Auxiliary to Missioner | 361 |
1 Catholic Domestic Mission Theory | 363 |
2 Missionary Sisters from 1920 to Vatican II | 366 |
3 Maryknoll Sisters after the Second Vatican Council | 378 |
4 Catholic Women Rediscover Mission | 401 |
A Concluding Note | 407 |
Selected Bibliography | 417 |
| 443 | |
Common terms and phrases
Africa Inland Mission American Board American Catholic women American women Ann Judson Archives Assemblies of God Baptist became began Bible boarding school Boston Catholic mission Chicago Training School China Chinese Christ Christian Christian home College Congregational culture deaconess denominational divine early ecumenical evangelism evangelistic faith missions Foochow Foreign Missionary Society Foreign Missions founded girls Gospel Harriet heathen History holiness holiness movement husband Ibid India indigenous Jesus Kikuyu Lucy male Mary Lyon Maryknoll Sisters Methodist Episcopal Church Methodist women ministry missiology mission boards mission field mission movement Missionary Sisters missionary wives missionary women Mount Holyoke native Nestorian nineteenth century non-Christian organization Pentecostal Peru preaching premillennial Presbyterian Press priests Protestant religion religious role Rufus Anderson Sarah single women sion sionary social spiritual teachers teaching theology Thoburn tion twentieth century United Study western WFMS wife Woman's Board Woman's Foreign Missionary woman's missionary movement World Friendship York
Popular passages
Page 18 - For several weeks past, my mind has been greatly agitated. An opportunity has been presented to me, of spending my days among the heathen, in attempting to persuade them to receive the Gospel. Were I convinced of its being a call from God, and that it would be more pleasing to him, for me to spend my life in this way than in any other, I think I should be willing to relinquish every earthly object, and, in full view of dangers and hardships, give myself up to the great work.
Page 8 - She thirsted for the knowledge of gospel truth, in all its relations and dependencies. Besides the daily study of...
Page 2 - And this spake he not of himself: but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation; and not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad.
Page 2 - It will be your business, my dear children, to teach these women, to whom your husbands can have but little, or no access. Go then, and do all in your power, to enlighten their minds, and bring them to the knowledge of the truth.
Page 33 - Providence has placed me in a situation of life, where I have an opportunity of getting as good an education as I desire, I feel it would be highly criminal in me not to improve it. I feel, also, that it would be equally criminal to desire to be well educated and accomplished, from selfish motives, with a view merely to gratify my taste and relish for improvement, or my pride in being qualified to shine. I therefore resolved last winter, to attend the academy...
Page 26 - I do, that the light of the gospel may shine upon them ? They are perishing for lack of knowledge, while I enjoy the glorious privileges of a Christian land. Great God, direct me!
Page ix - In the century of the Enlightenment, educated Europeans awoke to a new sense of life. They experienced an expansive sense of power over nature and themselves: the pitiless cycles of epidemics, famines, risky life and early death, devastating war and uneasy peace - the treadmill of human existence - seemed to be yielding at last to the application of critical intelligence.