0.12 3.2 women's activities prior to 1880  (Page 4/4)

The end of Reconstruction caused an acceleration of organization among women—a WMU historian listed eight groups that formed in the 1870s Mrs. W. J. J. Smith, p. 32. —but there was no coordination among them to parallel the district associations and state conventions that the general denomination was forming. Forty years later, Mary Hill Davis remembered the era this way:

So far the work among the women had been as fragmentary and disconnected as the building by each bird of her nest in the spring. . . . think of thousands of women near and far, interested in the same thing, working at the same tasks, yet each isolated in her own community, cut off from the benefit of the experience of those who had walked the path before her, perhaps solved her difficulties, and gone on to greater things. Contact with other minds and other methods, the enthusiasm that comes with numbers, and the multiplied interest of a body of workers, all these were unknown factors in the work of women. . . . BS, December 14, 1911, p. 14. The address was given by Mary Hill Davis at the silver anniversary of Texas BWMW.

The specific impetus to cooperate came both from without the state (a call from the SBC) and from within (Anne Luther's decision to serve as a missionary). Among the southern states, one of the most active Baptist women's groups formed in Baltimore. Ann Baker Graves, a member of the Baltimore band, called other women to meet with her during the annual SBC meeting in 1868 to pray for the missions in China, where her son served. She also began a correspondence with women in other states and originated a collection plan for missions called "mite boxes"—small red paper boxes with an opening in the top for coins. Alma Hunt, History of Woman's Missionary Union (Nashville: Convention Press, 1964; rev. ed., 1976), pp. 12-13. These boxes, as did "mite societies," referred to the biblical story of the widow who made a small, but sacrificial gift of two mites. Mark 12:42-44; Luke 21:1-3. In a committee report given to the 1872 Convention, the Foreign Mission Board of the SBC took note, praised "the hand of the Lord . . . moving in the hearts of Christian women in England and America to organize," and heartily recommended the sending of unmarried women to the mission field. Proceedings of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1872, p. 35. The suggestion met an unfavorable response. A. Hunt, p. 13. Denominational giants like seminary professor John A. Broadus and Kentucky editor T. T. Eaton led the opposition, yet pro-woman forces slowly brought the Convention around by 1878 to the acceptance of a plan calling for each state to appoint a central committee of women to further mission causes, thus setting the stage for convention-wide cooperation. Proceedings of the SBC, 1878, pp. 31-32. The Foreign Mission Board and its secretary, H. A. Tupper, were among the foremost champions of this move because of women's potential mission support and because they knew that if the convention did not cooperate with its women, it could lose control of that phase of denominational work altogether. Probably the latter argument, "predicated on fear of the women setting up a separate organization as women in the North had done," gained more male support for women's work in the South than did any other. A. Hunt, p. 21. It also explains why the SBC carefully spelled out the fact that the women's central state committees that formed would be auxiliary to the state conventions and to the SBC.

In response to this call in 1878, women in the Independence church formed a Texas central committee for missions with Fannie Breedlove Davis as president and Anne Luther, corresponding secretary. The urgency of their task was enhanced by the fact that Miss Luther, daughter of the president of Baylor Female College, had volunteered the same year to serve as a missionary (Texas's first). The two wrote to other women in churches that comprised the State Convention and suggested that they convene when the annual state meeting was held. Their hours of laboriously hand-copying scores of letters were repaid when female representatives from twelve congregations met in the basement of the First Baptist Church in Austin on Sunday afternoon, October 3, 1880, and determined to form a Woman's Missionary Union (a name later adopted uniformly by SBC women's organizations). Fannie B. Davis was chosen president and $35.45 was collected for missions. Two men, F. M. Law and 0. C. Pope, presided over that first session and recorded the minutes. The election of officers and adoption of a constitution took place the following day. Tradition has it that at the same hour, Anne Luther was examined in the auditorium overhead by the State Mission Board and was subsequently approved to serve as a missionary in Brazil.

The records of the development of women's organizations in the General Association are less complete than those of the State Convention. Ladies' aid and industrial groups existed within churches, including one which raised $500 to lay the foundation of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, and a foreign mission society was begun in Dallas in 1879. Mrs. W. J. J. Smith, p. 32. Several Baptist state historians refer to a "Ladies General Aid Society" that functioned as a confederation of women's organizations among Baptists in the north central and northeast part of the state, but none gives a primary source for that information. Some examples are Baker, The Blossoming Desert, p. 150; Elliott, p. 211; Mrs. W. J. J. Smith, p. 40. Probably most authoritative is Annie Buckner Beddoe's statement that there was a "Ladies General Aid Society of North Texas auxiliary to the General Association" prior to 1886 in the BS, June 7, 1917, p. 7. Her.father, R. C. Buckner, was a leader in both the General Association and the BGCT. If such a formal grouping existed, it did not have the missionary focus and organizational base that already characterized the WMU of the State Convention. There is evidence, however, that groups of women from both conventions met in a consolidated body when the conventions merged in 1886. A Waco woman recorded that the seam joining the two was not instantly invisible for the women still identified with their old groups, but at the urging of the men, "tears dissolved" the previous separate associations, Historical Sketch, Woman's Auxiliary, Waco Baptist Association (1928), p. 6. and a new statewide association, Baptist Women Mission Workers (hereafter, abbreviated BWMW), was formed. In the decades that followed, the identity of BWMW and WMU merged, and the latter name was readopted in 1919 to conform with the rest of the SBC. The origin of statewide women's activities came to be dated 1880, rather than 1886; Texas WMU celebrated its centennial in 1980 at Austin's First Baptist Church, scene of the original State Convention women's gathering. Further evidence of the continuity between the original WMU and BWMW is seen in the fact that Fannie B. Davis was elected to continue as president of the organization that was born in 1886, and she served until 1895.