Kerala theological seminary

Sub: Role of women in the History of Christianity

Topic: Role of women in the Missionary movement
Submitted to Dr: Sajitha Ipe
By: Mr: Sam
Introduction
The Woman’s Missionary Movement of the late nineteenth century was the largest grass-roots movement of American
Protestant women of its day. Male-run denominational agencies continued to drag their feet on the appointment of
single women to the mission filed, even as competent men drew on their social capital to organize women’s societies
that provided opportunities for unmarried sisters, daughters and classmates. Missionary wives in the field saw the need
to increase the female work force and so threw their support behind the idea of single women missionaries. The result
of women working together was a revolution in American missionary personnel and philosophy. 1 By 1890, the
infusion of single women meant that women constituted sixty percent of the American mission force. The unity among
married and single women, prominent and ordinary women, missionary and home side women, and women of
different Protestant traditions resulted in the origin of the Woman’s Missionary Movement. Through its fund-raising,
its sending of single women as missionaries, and its distinctive ideology “Woman’s Work for Woman,” it had a major
impact on American mission theory and practice. With this introduction of the emergence of Woman’s Missionary
Movement, in this paper, an attempt is made to highlight how American women stitched together a missiology of local
auxiliaries, sacrificial pennies and ecumenical flexibility and brought about great changes mission.2
A Woman’s Missiology: “Woman’s Work for Woman
As women’s groups founded their own journals to disseminate missionary intelligence to their constituencies, a
common missiology emerged known as “Woman’s Work for Woman.” The basic goal of “Woman’s Work for
Woman” remained the same as in the mission theory of early nineteenth century wives- to evangelize women and so to
bring them to salvation. Protestant women looked around at the technological and educational advances of the post-
war period and saw the coming of God’s Kingdom as a real possibility, if only women could be mobilized. 3Mary
Lyon was considered as a missiological pioneer of the late nineteenth century whose influence had a deep impact on
the Women’s boards connected with the American Board. 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,” “Woman’s Work for Woman” was based on a maternalistic, albeit idealistic, belief that non-Christian
religions trapped and degraded women, yet all women in the world were sisters and should support each other. It
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. Belief in the worldwide unity of the female gender outweighed
class, national, or racial categories for proponents of “Woman’s Work for Woman.”4
The Women’s Foreign Missionary Society:
The Women’s Foreign Missionary Society began at the request of missionary wives in India with the help of Mrs.
Clementina Butler. The ideology of “Woman’s Work for Woman” arose from analysis of the Indian context, where
segregation of the sexes was the norm for both Muslim and Hindu upper classes, and where social practices of child
marriage, perpetual widowhood and religious sanctions against female education created a need for a special woman’s
mission of evangelism and social uplift. The Women’s Foreign Missionary Society not only paid for and appointed its
own missionaries, but it sent the first female physicians and it opened the first women’s hospitals in India, China and
Korea. Missionaries from the society opened the first college for women in Asia. 5
The Women’s Foreign Missionary Society, the most powerful women’s mission organization of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, demonstrates some of the key missiological issues for “Woman’s Work for

1
Billie Melman, Women’s Orient: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918( London 1995), 166.
2
Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of their Thought and practice ( Macon: Mercer
University Press, 1998), 78.
3
Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission.,167.
4
Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission,167.
5
Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission, 145.
1
Woman.”Missionaries with the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society undertook mission work in three major areas:
education, medicine and evangelism.6
Educational Mission:
As the “female” mode of evangelism during the early nineteenth century, education of women and children was the
first open door available to women missionaries under the new women’s mission board. Teaching in either schools,
homes or orphanages was thus the most frequent role for single missionary women. Not only had the role of teacher
functioned as the female parallel to the ordained ministry since the time of Ann Judson,but the ideology of “Woman’s
Work for Woman” was based on the idea that education was the key for the liberation of women around the world.7
Missionary women founded a full range of educational institutions in response to their faith in education as a means of
both evangelism and social uplift. As missionary training schools, Bible Schools and nurses’ training schools became a
part of the American educational scene in the late nineteenth century. The issue of Christian colleges for women first
arose in India initiated by Isabella Thoburn. By the 1890s, the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society was pushing its
girls’ boarding schools to a collegiate level in India, China and Korea. For Thoburn and the Women’s Foreign
Missionary Society, the education of women for leadership was a missiological goal in itself.8
Medical Mission:
By 1909, the woman’s missionary movement had sent out 147 physicians and 91 trained nurses, representing ten
percent of woman’s mission force, and was supporting 82 dispensaries and 80 hospitals around the world. The effect of
women’s medical missions was far greater than its members suggest, both because their existence opened the way for
the gospel in many otherwise hostile places, and because missionary doctors made the training of indigenous medical
women a top priority and so revolutionized the medical treatment of women in India and China.9
Evangelistic Mission:
Although all missionary women considered their work evangelistic, public support for women evangelists lagged
behind that for women teaches and doctors. The first evangelists sent by the WFMS to India was euphemistically
called “zenana workers,” missionaries who entered women’s quarters to teach reading and sewing, but also to engage
women in spiritual conversation. The idea of Zenana worker could be justified on the basis of “Woman’s Work for
Woman,” that only woman could reach secluded women with the gospel. The first woman employed by the WFMS
with the full-time designation of ‘evangelist” was Phoebe Rowe, who joined Isabella Thoburn’s work in Lucknow in
1877. The zenana movement, pioneered by British women but quickly adopted by the Americans, was an effort to
reach higher-caste women who were confined to their homes which was not in the case of the lower caste. The
movement absorbed the WFMS which raised money and founded a zenana issue of Heathen Woman’s Friend so that
newly literate women would have Christian reading matter. 10
Mrs. Harriet Warren was its first editor and is considered as a major leader of “Woman’s Work for Woman.” In the
meantime, the deaconess movement finally fully legitimated the role of woman evangelist within Methodist missions
and in 1888, Bishop Thoburn made Phoebe Rowe India’s first deaconess. In the area of evangelism, one sees the
fullest and earliest practice of partnership between indigenous and western women. By 1909, the woman’s missionary
movement had employed 441 missionaries as “evangelists and zenana workers,” but it had hired 6,154 “Bible women
and native workers.”11
The late nineteenth century woman’s missionary movement conflated culture with religion, attributing the strengths of

6
Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission,145.
7
Amy Oden (ed), In Her Words: Women’s Writings in the History of Christian Thought, (Nashville: Abingdon Press,
1994), 326,327.
8
Amy Oden (ed), In Her Words: Women’s Writings, 326,327.
9
Amy Oden (ed), In Her Words: Women’s Writings, 326,327.
10
Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission,167.
11
Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission,168.
2
western culture to its Christianity, and the weaknesses of non-western culture to other religions. By analyzing non-
Christian religions in terms of gender oppression and concluding that only women could reach other women with the
gospel, it gave convincing rationale for women’s wide spread participation in the mission of the church. It hoped that
the conversion of women to Christianity would trigger social changes that would attract more women to Christianity,
thus putting into motion a continuous cycle that in the divine plan would lead to a better world through the conversion
of whole nations. Its belief in the inseparability of body and soul, of social context and personal religion, and of
evangelistic, educational and medical work was a central contribution to the mission theory of the period.12
Women missionaries
Mary Lyon,:A schoolteacher from Massachusetts, America, was the pioneer who founded the world wide model of
higher education for women.She is considered as the important personality in the history of mission.13
Jarena Lee: Lee born in the year1783 at New Jersey, Lee left home at the age of seven to become a maid in a
household. Though lee is recognized as the first female preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, she was
not ordained. Lee used to conduct prayer meetings and preach in the churches.
In this way, lee’s teaching ministry through preaching in the church is remarkable. 14
Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922): Ramabai was the daughter of orthodox Hindu parents and the native of India. When she
was eight, she learned to read the sacred puranic literature from her parents. At that time, there were no schools for
girls or women, and training in the sacred literature was forbidden. After her family suffered during an extreme
famine, Ramabai and her brother journeyed to Calcatta in 1878. in 1881, at age twenty-two she married, but sooner he
died leaving her with an infant. In 1883 she left for England to study, and there was baptized. After returning to India,
she established the Mukti mission in 1889, to provide education and opportunities for women and girls of India.15
Amy Carmichael (1867-1951): Carmichael was a Protestant Christian missionary in India, who opened an orphanage
and founded a mission in Dohnavur. She served in India for fifty-five years without absence. Amy Carmichael was
born in the small village of Millisle in Northern Ireland to David and Catherine Carmichael. In many ways she was an
unlikely candidate for missionary work. She suffered neuralgia, a disease of the nerves that made her whole body weak
and achy and often put her in bed for weeks on end. It was at the Keswick Convention of 1887 that she heard Hudson
Taylor speak about missionary life.Soon afterward, she became convinced of her calling to missionary work.16
Initially Amy traveled to Japan for fifteen months, but she later found her lifelong vocation in India. She was
commissioned by the Church of England Zenana Mission. Much of her work was with young ladies, some of whom
were saved from forced prostitution. The organization she founded was known as the Dohnavur Fellowship. Dohnavur
is situated in Tamil Nadu, thirty miles from the southern tip of India. The fellowship would become a sanctuary for
over one thousand children. In an effort to respect Indian culture, members of the organization wore Indian dress and
the children were given Indian names. She herself dressed in Indian clothes, dyed her skin with coffee, and often
traveled long distances on India's hot, dusty roads to save just one child from suffering. Even today, the educational
institution stated by Amy Carmichael stand as the monument for her contribution in serving the children of the
missionaries.17
Reflection&conclusion
The history of Missionary movements clearly highlights changes in the women missionaries through the period. It also
clearly reveals that the pioneer women missionaries (1836-1870) were products of a male dominated culture and

12
Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission,170.
13
Eliza F. Kent, Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India (Oxford University
Press, London, 2004 ), 3.
14
Eliza F. Kent, Converting Women: Gender and Protestant…, 4.
15
Gouri Srivastava, Women’s Higher Education in the 19th Century (New Delhi: Ashok Kumar Mittal Concept
Publishing Company, 2000), 38.
16
Eliza F. Kent, Converting Women: Gender and Protestant, 4.
17
Eliza F. Kent, Converting Women: Gender and Protestant,4.
3
therefore, they did not envisage a society free of male domination in the mission fields. Hence, their work received less
publicity and recognition. Moreover, the wives were not considered as missionaries but they were only referred to as
spouses. They were as ‘invisible’ workers, though quite indispensable. Due to the prevailing control of male
domination, both in the mission filed and society, the missionaries could not voice their feelings strongly. But in many
ways, we can perceive their feelings though their activities. Though women were accorded only limited recognition
and were still under the control of their male colleagues, they began to make contributory participation in society and
also began to make their mark on the mission field. The missiological rationale of “Woman’s Work for Woman” and
its emphasis on the unique place of women in the missionary enterprise clearly explains how women not only played
the role of helpers but also of leaders, of primary workers and not of secondary. The movement was both a liberation
and step forward through which women also played a prominent role in paving the way for an ecumenical mission
breaking down the barriers amongst denominations, regions and nations.
Bibliography
Kent, F. Eliza. Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India. Oxford University Press,
London, 2004.
Melman, Billie. Women’s Orient: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918. London 1995.
Oden Amy. (ed), In Her Words: Women’s Writings in the History of Christian Thought. Nashville: Abingdon Press,
1994.
Robert, L. Dana. American Women in Mission: A Social History of their Thought and practice. Macon: Mercer
University Press, 1998.
Srivastava, Gouri. Women’s Higher Education in the 19th Century. New Delhi: Ashok Kumar Mittal
Concept Publishing Company, 2000.