3.3 3.4 the administration of lou b. williams, 1895-1906.  (Page 10/5)

Although Baptist women did not publicly engage in the controversy over control of the convention boards that took place in the 1890s, there was some division among them (e.g., Fannie Davis's sympathy with S. A. Hayden), and their work, like other agencies of the mission boards, was criticized and weakened. In this unstable situation, the annual BWMW meeting of 1895 was chaired by a substitute for the president, and the nominee for Mrs. Davis's permanent replacement, Lou Williams, was taken completely by surprise at her election:

I felt I was unable and unprepared to fill the place, but blessed promises were claimed: "as thy days so shall be thy strength. . . ."

With a large family depending on me as the homemaker, I knew I could not give all my time to the work, as Mrs. Davis had done, but the faithful women who had had a part in the work and were giving of their time and their great strength so devotedly would be a great help to me, so I felt that I was not alone. Quoted in Mrs. W. J. J. Smith, p. 138. Mrs. Smith, Texas WMU Historian from 1924-47, was Lou B. Williams's daughter.

Lou Beckley grew up in Missouri, but came to Texas at the close of the Civil War to marry her lawyer-sweetheart, W. L. Williams. They settled in Dallas and, along with nine others, chartered the First Baptist Church in 1868. From the beginning the small group of women members of that church took responsibility for raising money to build a building, and once that was completed they went on to other charitable and benevolent endeavors. By 1879 they began supporting organized missions and were part of the consolidated women's body that formed in 1886. While Mrs. Williams had been steadily active in various phases of religious work, she was not the spokeswomen and public figure that her predecessor had been. She was present in Richmond, Virginia, when the WMU of the SBC was formed, but she was not a Texas delegate, nor did she play a leadership role in that organization during her presidency. The family demands she mentioned curtailed some of her activity: an invalid daughter died while she was president, and both a son and her husband expired within a few years of her retirement.

Mrs. Williams's retiring, uncontroversial stance was fortuitous in the transitional role she filled between two strong presidents. For ten years, she shared with the BWMW a deep faith and stability that undercut opposition and stood firm on larger goals. Although she was hailed as a model of efficiency, BS, December 14, 1911, p. 15. her incapacity to travel widely forced members of the organization to share her responsibilities, then to define and enlarge them. She, on the other hand, learned to give plain-spoken speeches sprinkled with biblical admonitions that made "every lady present [feel] that they were glad that she was their leader." BS, November 16, 1899, p. 14.

The first crisis of her tenure as president was the withdrawal of Mina Everett's support by the three boards that supplied it. Under fire themselves in the midst of Hayden's charges, the board members sought to remove sources of controversy, and one of those was Miss Everett, who was too aggressive for some of the influential pastors. They were especially critical of her speaking to groups that included men. The women responded by providing office furnishings for her in the space donated by the American Baptist Publication Society in Dallas, and the BWMW supplied support for her to carry on a voluminous correspondence with the contacts she had made in her five years of traversing the state. The next year, 1896, she reported more societies organized and more money raised than in any previous report despite her inability to travel, but compromise was not her style, and, against the wishes of the BWMW, she resigned. Although she moved out of the state, she maintained contact and ultimately had the satisfaction of knowing that seeds she had planted—suggestions of a church building loan fund, a convention-owned paper, a women's training school, and an encampment—came to fruition. Mrs. W. J. J. Smith, pp. 42-43. This unusually frank report of controversy is quoted from an anonymous source.