3.1 3.2 women's activities prior to 1880  (Page 8/4)

The organization of Baptist women in Texas followed the same general pattern of development demonstrated by the other denominational state bodies: a few loosely bound groups formed prior to the Civil War; wider cooperative efforts were made during the 1870s and 1880s; consolidation and standardization finally were achieved with the formal statewide unification of missionary forces in 1886. The deviation exhibited by women's groups was steadier numerical and financial growth, greater efficiency, more inner cohesion, and less dramatic confrontations than the denomination as a whole experienced.

Baptist women's activities prior to 1880 cannot be discovered from women's own writing or archives, but must be deduced from oral tradition and the references made by male historians; specifically, J. B. Link, who published two volumes of the Texas Historical and Biographical Magazine , a collection of Baptist records and recollections, in 1891-92 and J. M. Carroll, whose voluminous history published in 1923 reflected fifty years of his own experience and research as well as material gathered by other Baptists, dating back to the 1840s. Carroll, pp. ix-xi. From these sources, tradition has kept alive the story of Massie Millard and the prayer meeting held in a thicket near Nacogdoches in 1832, although rather than her praying for safety from Indian raiders, as Link implies, Link, I, 24. a revisionist view in a later Woman's Missionary Union history suggests that Mrs. Millard and the women with her "prayed for and tried to help the Mexican and Indian women into whose territory they had come." Inez B. Hunt, Century One: A Pilgrimage of Faith (Woman's Missionary Union, 1979), p. 10. Historical accounts through the 1930s made no attempt to hide disdain for the Mexicans and Indians whose territory was invaded by colonists, but felt that a superior people and system justified the takeover. "The fair land was to be redeemed from the haunts of blood-thirsty savages" by these "Anglo-American people" was their common sentiment. Quote from Mrs. W. J. J. Smith, A Centennial History of the Baptist Women of Texas: 1830-1930 (Dallas: Woman's Missionary Union of Texas, 1933), p. 16. Annette Lea Bledsoe and her sister Margaret, who became the wife of Sam Houston, were other Baptist heroines. Mrs. Bledsoe came from cultured family life in Alabama to the wilds of Texas in 1835, where she is credited with organizing, along with Massie Millard, the first Baptist woman's society at the Nacogdoches church. She and the Houstons made their home in Independence after 1841 where Annette Bledsoe became what Link termed "a home missionary," visiting and teaching from settlement to settlement, including the Spanish-speaking. Link, II, 294-96. The Lea family silver was cast into a bell for the Independence Baptist Church.

Numerous nameless women and those about whom nothing is known beyond their names constituted a portion of the membership of each church that was formed, and in some cases they held the body together ("the sisters [took] very decisive action against its dissolution" reported Link about one church). Link, II, 273. Thomas Pilgrim had some women enlisted to teach in his Sunday school before it was suppressed by the Mexican government, Carroll, p. 42. but, according to Z. N. Morrell, another woman met Mexican resistance with more success: