Dana Lee Robert

History & Background

Dana Roberts’s historical account of American Women in missions paints a positive portrait of women actively involved in the central tasks of missions, commonly considered the ‘quintessential male task’. Roberts’ account provides a chronological outline of the evolution of missions, beginning with William Carey’s manifesto, “An Enquiry Into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen” in 1972. Published by William Carey, the manifesto is considered the symbolic starting point of missions. With limited accounts of female involvement and stereotypes that women were not interested in active missions, Roberts’ presents a liberating view that women desired to be completely involved in missions. However, few records are maintained that involve the efforts and contributions of women because

“Official accounts of the early years of the mission movement were written in terms of how the formal structures and the leadership of the missionary agencies (the sending agencies) were set up. Women played no role in any of that segment of history. Additionally, women were seldom included due to the definition of the word ‘missionary’. “Missionary” was narrowly defined as ordained males sent to preach the gospel and found churches. This study shows from the beginning women were moved by the mission call and wanted to play a full part. The lack of responsiveness by the official structures led, in time, to new initiatives by women that greatly expanded program scope and redefined the meaning of who is a missionary.

However, let’s examine this dynamic, that the “women” that are highlighted in this work are limited to Caucasian women since these accounts are very early in the fabric of American History. In essence during this time that the African Americans were not freed as slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation was not put into effect by President Abraham Lincoln and Congress until January 1, 1865. January 1865, Congress sent to the state legislatures for ratification what became the Thirteenth Amendment, banning slavery in all U.S. states and territories. During the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s Lyndon B. Johnson invoked the Emancipation Proclamation holding it up as a promise yet to be fully implemented. Profound works in mission and ministry have taken place by women prior to these times. In fact, the beginning of missions happened in 1792 which is only a few years after the beginning of the founding of the United States. While “Caucasian women” can celebrate the history of being included in mission and later ministry due to their efforts, though limited, African American women are not captured during the main arteries of these times because we are just being considered persons (and not property) as an ethnicity in the late 1860s. While on a larger scope it is wonderful that women are counted and reflected in missions in some way, as it is an avenue of hope for all of us. However, I would be remiss to think that if you lived during that time how would African American women have emerged upon the stages of public missions and ministry because this is not handled here. While I know our account exist somewhere, it is just interesting to have to consider celebrating the efforts of “women’s” accounts when the ethnicity of the student studying is not covered – and they can’t be because of their cultural or societal positions. “We” were identified as the persons “visited” in non-westernized nations that the American missionaries came over to help improve our conditions, not pictured as the ones that were intellectually trained in the best schools sent to empower others abroad. [Which makes what Bishop Thabo Masenya shared in South Africa so valuable.] Can we celebrate the global importance captured here? Yes. I just thought I would share when you’re reviewing the text, please note that “we” were in the US but not considered American, citizens or persons. Hence, one of the main reasons that I believe that “we” were not included in the archives of American Women in Mission… [Note: The book does mention two African American men that were missionaries in the beginning of the work. ]

The Scope of the Study
A major challenge in trying to write a history of the mission theory of American women, however, is the lack of clarity over what scholars mean by ‘mission theory’. American missionaries tend to function as activities rather than theoreticians. After 1850, American mission theory focused on the idea of the indigenous church: the broadly assumed purpose was to plant churches in the non-western world. British missiologist Timothy Yates notes that American missions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were primarily concerned with the “extension and expansion” of either Christendom or the Kingdom of God in history. In the early 1900s, Presbyterian mission executive Robert Speer wrote that mission theory concerned itself the aim, the means, and the methods of missions. This study, therefore, assumes first of all that women have indeed participated in the creation of distinctively American mission theories. Secondly, it assumes that gender has affected the shape of American mission theories. Finally, this study assumes that mission theory includes the motivations, goals, theological assumptions, and reflection upon practical strategies that American women employed as they participated in foreign missions.

The mission theory of American women remained hidden from view because by and large they shared theological, social and political contexts of their husbands and male co-workers, yet as lay persons they did not produce the theological and sermonic literature that has set the parameters of discussion. Women’s lack of attention to ecclesiological issues within missiology has also been due to their subordinate position in the formal structures of the church. Even in the late nineteenth century, after women had begun to produce mission literature for women’s periodicals, men read their papers because of the impropriety of women speaking publicly before men. In the 1930s, a Methodist Episcopal Church, South, missionary woman on furlough who preached regularly at her station was not allowed to speak from the pulpit of American churches, an exclusionary practice that still exists in some American denominations.

Hence, the lack of attention to women’s mission theory is indicative of the raw uncharted state of the sources. Since women seldom approached missiology systematically, and since they did not attend theological seminaries in any significant numbers until the 1970s, it impossible to track their mission theory through reading formal documents, theological treatises, or by following debates over mission theory in the various denominations. In the early nineteenth century, published diaries and letters are the major source from which women’s mission thought must be inferred against the more general history of the American missionary movement itself.

Roberts examines in depth the mission theory of a dominant theory of dominant group of women in a given time period, including the Methodist women in China, Presbyterians, women in Burma, and Kenya.

The Definition of Missionary
The word ‘missionary’ was narrowly defined as “ordained males sent to preach the gospel and found churches”. The lack of responses from officials resulted in women broadening of the scope of missions and redefining the true meaning of a missionary. Historically, the stereotype associated with women in mission is the “civilizing tasks of mission, teaching, tending the sick, carrying for the orphans and the like. They had less opportunity for “pure” evangelism or church planting.” The stereotype of the woman missionary has ranged from the long-suffering wife to the spinster in her unstylish dress and wire-rimmed glasses, alone somewhere for thirty years teaching ‘heathen’ children. The underlying message of the stereotypes is that missionary women have been perceived as marginal to the central tasks of mission. Rather than being remembered for preaching the gospel, the quintessential male task, missionary women have been noted for meeting human needs and helping others, sacrificing themselves without plan or reason. 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 , though the first foreign missionaries in 1812 were among the best educated women of their time.

The identity as a woman caused them to develop gender-based mission theories. Early nineteenth century women seldom wrote the theologies of mission, but they wrote letters and kept journals that reveal a rich thorough 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 in the advancement of God’s kingdom. The woman’s missionary movement reached its ideological peak in 1910, the year women from around the United States celebrated the fifty-year jubilee of the founding of separate women’s mission boards. By the 1920s, women’s mission theory was part of mainstream Protestant missiology, emphasizing under the concept “World Friendship” such themes as ecumenism, peace education, higher education for women, and partnership and cooperation between first and third world churches. By the 1930s, the eve of the Second World War, having largely outgrown the gender-based cultural separatism of the nineteenth century, women’s mission theory and the movement itself were merging into the male-dominated denominational structures.

Gender-Based Mission Theories

Woman for Woman’s Work
The basic goal of “Woman’s Work for Woman” remained the same as the mission theory of early nineteenth century wives – to evangelize women and so to bring them to salvation. But the end of evangelization was not the establishment of three-self churches: for “heathen” women, evangelization was intertwined with “civilization,” with being elevated by Christianity into social equality with western women and into positions of respect in their own societies. The proponents of “Woman’s Work for Woman” assumed that non-Christian religions led to the degradation of women, while Christianity provided not only salvation but “civilization,” the nineteenth century term for social liberation, albeit in western dress. The early stages of the woman’s missionary movement kept “evangelization” and “civilization” in tension, believing that each led to the other – that the Christian gospel was one piece with western-style social progress.

Women’s mission theory was holistic, with emphasis on both evangelism and meeting human needs. Women’s mission theory emphasized education, in the nineteenth century as the functional equivalent of preaching, and in the twentieth century for social liberation. Women tended to work ecumenically and to develop common gender-based strategies vis-à-vis denominational ones. Women missionaries took risks, pioneering new forms of mission ranging from medical work to training Bible women to accompanying the poor. “Woman’s Work for Woman” aimed to put into place instruments of education, medical work, and evangelization that would raise women to the status they presumably held in Christian countries. Women missionaries took risks, pioneering forms of mission ranging from medical work to training Bible women to accompanying the poor. The work of the woman’s missionary movement increased the numbers of female converts resulting in women becoming the majority among the mission force. Their commitment to the social and charitable side of mission transformed the face of American missions.

Woman’s Work for Woman had a major impact on American mission theory and practice. It gave a convincing rationale for women’s widespread participation in the mission of the church. By arguing that education, medicine, and social reform were essential to the evangelization of women, it promoted a holistic definition of mission that helped to move American mission theory away from the three-self theory that had dominated the 1840s through the 1860s. Although it never repudiated Mary Lyon, the most influential woman mission theorist of the antebellum period. The most obvious difference between Woman’s Work for Woman and the antebellum woman’s mission movement was that whereas the earlier movement made a married mission force the norm, the later movement consisted primarily of married women supporting single women in mission work.

The Missionary Wife

The model of the contemporary ‘First Lady’ experiences such boundary. The ‘model’ has not expanded beyond her being the ‘master’ or leader of civilizing tasks. When a woman is gifted outside of the confines of the acceptable ‘model’ (per each gender-specific role), controversy or challenge develops

A farewell sermon from The Reverend Jonathan Allen probably set women apart for a ministerial role. The “young ladies” in question were Harriet Atwood and Ann Hasseltine. Officially designated as “assistant missionaries”, the wives of the first American foreign missionaries served as role models for women in ministry during the early nineteenth century. Allen studied theology with Ephraim Judson, the uncle of Ann’s husband, Adoniram Judson. Allen felt personal commitment to the success of sending out women with the very first group of American foreign missionaries. Turning to Harriet, Allen praised the women for being willing to leave their families in order to promote Christ’s kingdom. Allen charged the missionary wives (an example of the first ministerial charge to women):

“It will be your business, my dear children, to teach these women, to whom your husbands can have but little or no access. Go there, and do all in your power, to enlighten their minds, and bring them to the knowledge of the truth. God, and if possible, raise their character to the dignity of rational beings, and to the rank of Christians in a Christian land. Teach them to realize, that they are not an inferior race of creatures; but stand upon a part with men. Teach them that they have immortal souls; and are no longer to burn themselves, in the same fire, with the bodies of their departed husbands. Go, bring them from their cloisters into the assemblies of the saints. Teach them to accept of Christ as their Savior, and to enjoy the privileges of the children of God.

The Roles of Missionary Men vs. Women

In his speech to the women, Allen made the revolutionary assumption that the biblical mandate to “Go” was incumbent upon the women as well as the men of the church. But instead of going to preach, a prerogative confined to men by New England Congregationalism, Allen advised the women that they were going to teach – a mandate biblically parallel to the expectation that their husbands should “reach the gospel to every creature.” Allen’s charge to the first missionary wives showed that people expected more of them than of their husbands. The missionary men were supposed to devote themselves single-mindedly to disseminating the Gospel in preached or written form. The missionary women were expected both to assist their husbands in the primary mission responsibility of spreading the Gospel and to evangelize the women, teaching them of Christ, enlightening their minds, raising their characters, and challenging their social customs. Allen’s charge to the women included subverting indigenous customs deemed injurious to women, such as the burning of widows in India. Effecting social transformations was thus part of the mandate of missionary wives from the beginning of the foreign mission enterprise. The decision of the American Board to send these women also meant that child bearing, child rearing, and household management in a hostile foreign culture were implicitly included in their list of responsibilities. As women and as laity rather than clergy, the “assistant missionaries” had neither voice nor vote in discussions of mission theory and strategy. It is no wonder that the mission theory of the early wives must be extracted from the minute details of their lives, faithfully recorded in their journals and letters to loved ones, and edited by others. As they sat silently at the missionary meetings, the movement of their sewing needles substituted for their voices.

The Missionary Teacher

Three Self Theory
Three self-theory focuses on planting indigenous churches. Three-self mission theory meant that he increasingly evaluated women’s contribution to mission in relationship to church planting, thereby refining and narrowing its social mandate.

The various Indian and Ceylon missions were noteworthy for having had education as a top priority since their founding, and by the 1850s they had developed some of the most westernized curricula of all the mission schools connected with the American Board. Instruction in English and in western science played a large role in the upper level schools, both male and female. But after nearly forty years with education as a top mission strategy in Indian and Ceylon, the numbers of conversions remained depressingly low. The conclusions reached by the Deputation about the Indian and Ceylon missions were that it was time to streamline the educational system and make it directly subservient to evangelism. In accordance with strict three-self policy, the Anderson Deputation reduced higher education for women to supplying wives for native pastors. The Deputation seemed oblivious to the fact that Oodville was a successful venue of evangelistic work for missionary women whose calling to be teachers was the female equivalent call to preach. The Deputation’s reduction of the growing female educational movement in the American Board was not limited to Ceylon. They reduced the number of girls’ primary schools across India as well. However, necessary it may have been to reform the mission education system in India and Ceylon in 1855, the end result of making education subservient to evangelism was to frustrate the major way that female missionaries were able to minister in the Indian context.

Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS)
The women who founded the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society in 1869 and led it for the next thirty years were educated in a co-educational Methodist institution, nurtured in the affirming atmosphere of the holiness movement, and possessing Methodism’s optimism and activism. The commitment of Woman’s Work for Woman to education and piety as the key for the elevation of women everywhere grew out of the context of the WFMS founders. The survival of the organization itself despite the male-dominated hierarchy of the Methodist Episcopal Church was because the founding women had friends in high places who shared their goals – namely their husbands. The leaders of the WFMS saw no contradiction among evangelization, experiences of holiness, and the higher education of women. Like Mary Lyon, they believed that both education and piety were necessary for women to serve a useful purpose.

Evangelists & Deaconess
The first evangelists sent by the WFMS to India were euphemistically called “zeanna workers”, missionaries who entered women’s quarters to teach reading and sewing, but also to engage women in spiritual conversation. The idea of a zeanna worker could be justified on the basis of “Woman’s Work for Woman,” that only women could reach secluded women with the gospel.

The deaconess movement finally fully legitimated the role of woman evangelist within Methodist missions. In 1888, Bishop Thoburn made Phoebe Rowe India’s first deaconess. Deaconess evangelists supervised a home for homeless women and evangelized the city. One of the problems with problems of designating a missionary an evangelist, that of lack of experience, was solved once the Chicago Training School was founded and required field work of its students. The other problem, ignorance of the language and the culture, was solved by pairing the missionary evangelist with an indigenous Bible woman with whom she could itinerate. Often women who felt a call to evangelism would begin in educational work where they could master the language, and then later transfer to a more directly evangelistic position.

The category of evangelist was the third major role open to missionaries of the WFMS, although its prosecution was more problematic because of the bias toward employing indigenous women to do most of the evangelistic work. “Bible women” were both cheaper to support and more effective as evangelists than western women. To be appointed full-time evangelists, missionary women needed public approval for their role and prior experience in evangelism, neither of which were widely available until the late 1880s. In addition, they needed knowledge of the culture and language or else a considerable amount of help from indigenous women. In the area of evangelism, one sees the fullest and earliest practice of partnership.

Women & Independent Evangelical Missions
Participation in early faith missions for women was both a liberation and then a step backward. As founders, evangelists, and sometimes as ordained leaders, they overcame the gender-linked limitations built into the woman’s missionary movement. However, without the missiological rationale of “Woman’s Work for Woman,” and its emphasis on the unique place women in the missionary enterprise, it was all too easy to fall back into the early-nineteenth century pattern of being helpers rather than leaders, secondary rather than primary workers, categorized as “wife” or “old maid”. The irony was that while faith mission women were throwing the gender-based mission theory of the woman’s missionary movement out the front door, second-class status came knowing on the back.

Ministry Impact
Given the diverse history of American women in mission, can any conclusion be drawn about the parameters of American women’s mission thought that cut across denominational, geographic, and generational boundaries? Despite sharing the overall mission theories and attitudes of men of their own ears. American mission women across the years exhibited common, gender-based concerns and emphases in their mission theory. First of all, women had in common their subordination to the official, usually male-dominated, structures of the church. In some cases, as among the missionary wives of the early nineteenth century and Catholic sisters before Vatican II, the work of women was clearly considered auxiliary to the primary (male) task of church planting. As female lay persons, missionary women’s roles were usually perceived as secondary to that of the ordained male. Even when women had their own gender-specific mission societies and separate constituencies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their lack of rights in the church itself meant that they operated in an ecclesiastical context that was unpredictable and accepted or rejected them according to its own whims. In turn-of-the-century evangelical circles, where mission theory was supposedly gender blind, the subjection of women to male authority meant that in practice women were often assigned to marginal tasks or were isolated on the fringes of the mission in order to fulfill their vocations as evangelists.

The subordination of women missionaries to male-dominated norms and structures has had important ramifications for mission theory. By and large women have not concentrated on ecclesiology or theories of the church, in their reflection on mission. Men have been the “gatekeepers” of the institutional church and theories about its relation to mission. Women have rather concerned themselves with the personal and ethical aspects of omission. Put another way, women’s mission theory focused either on personal witnessing or on working toward the reign of God. Church planting and the subsequent relationship between church and mission was rarely part of women’s public missiological agenda. Even if women planted mission churches in practice, suitable men took over the pastor work as soon as possible.

For the earliest Protestant missionary women, to serve as a teacher was living out the Great Commission (Matt. 28:19-20) – as the female equivalent of the preacher. As the value of schooling became apparent for breaking down prejudice against Christianity, for attacking non-Christian world views, and for providing wives for Christian men, the role of the missionary teacher provided an entry point for single women to become missionaries. The most influential Protestant missionary teachers were by and large unmarried women. The most influential Protestant missionary teachers were by and large unmarried women.

Nursing was at the forefront of healing ministry among Roman Catholic women missionaries. The important of healing was a woman’s form of mission was affirmed as recently as 1983 with the founding of the Baptist Nursing Fellowship, whose purpose was to provide Baptist nurses and nursing students with opportunities for missions work. Among Pentecostals, preparation for missionary work emerged from the healing homes turned Bible schools operated by holiness advocates Elizabeth Baker and Virginia Moss. These early-twentieth-century healing homes cultivated a spirituality for mission; many who came to pray for healing and to study the Scriptures left filled with the Spirit and able to live the hard life of a “faith missionary.”

By the late nineteenth century, the education of women had become a linchpin of “Woman’s Work for Woman,” with the assumption that no society could rise higher than its women: if we women were oppressed the society could not advance. To educate women would show that women deserved respect from men as rational human beings.… (mer)