4.2 4.3 mission field  (Page 9/9)

Baptist women missionaries did experience enough latitude to answer many of their needs for a wider field of service. Annie Jenkins Sallee, like Anne Luther Bagby, fulfilled her calling by becoming primarily an educator; with the absence of children of her own, she administered several schools and a large staff. She engaged in entrepreneurial enterprises—selling handwork and rugs for the benefit of the mission—and promoted its projects actively in the Baptist press and in person during her stateside visits. She and Mr. Sallee returned to the United States in 1930 when he was asked to serve as secretary of the Foreign Mission Board, but after his sudden death in 1931, she went back to Kaifeng and continued with her work there until taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1941. She was repatriated the following year.

From invisible roles as wives and questionable status as single women, female missionaries gained in expertise and stature during the period of this study. Instead of having to be attached to some male's family, they gained the option of defining their own assignments, traveling alone, and living alone or only with other women. Although practice varied from station to station, they generally insisted upon (and men asked that they take) an active role in shaping the policy of the mission. When a male superior on leave made a decision in 1885 regarding the mission in which Lottie Moon taught, she wrote an ultimatum to the Southern Baptist committee in charge of the work:

Here in Tengchow the ladies have always been admitted on equal terms with the gentlemen of the mission when meeting to consider the matters pertaining to the conduct of the work here. . . .At one time, as you know, the mission was left entirely in the hands of women. . .To exclude the married women from the meetings might be unwise, but it could hardly be deemed unjust, as they are represented by their husbands. To exclude the unmarried ladies would be a most glaring piece of injustice in my opinion. To such exclusion I would never submit, and retain my self-respect. ^{Ibid., pp. 135-136.}

The committee reversed its decision in favor of the egalitarian pattern already established.

Although married missionary women were viewed by the supporting boards as the assisting member of a team and many were limited by household and childrearing responsibilities, they still had the opportunity to exercise a more varied ministry than church women in America. Because their husbands were often traveling or engrossed in church and school projects of their own, women became sole administrators of the work among women and children, developing schools and craft industries and training native workers. The lack of guidelines and precedents and the distance from cautious maintainers of denominational tradition back in the States enabled them to define daily ministries on their own terms. Denied pulpits, they found a wide audience for their written reports and shaped Americans' perceptions of foreign people and places. Many were more assertive when they returned to America because they were accustomed to forging new paths and because they were seized with the urgency and immensity of their task. Even though some Texans still frowned on Mina Everett's sharing her evangelistic fervor with a church audience in 1895, most churches accepted returned missionaries as their first women speakers. Soon after the turn of the century these women—especially single women, widows, or women on leave without their husbands—were commonly invited to give reports to church groups including males. Not only were they allowed to speak, but within the missionary context assertion and audacity in a female was actually encouraged. After a visit with Lottie Moon in 1903, J. B. Cranfill proudly reported that she would not hesitate, at any time,

to tell the story of the Cross to any inquiring soul of either sex.

Missionary work offered nineteenth-century women a context for exercising both power and nurture that was matched only by their responsibility in childrearing. It provided a blend of manipulation and altruism that harmonized with the progressive outlook of most Americans prior to World War I but took on the tinge of self-righteousness and chauvinism in the secular, disunified, and less innocent world that emerged after the war, one in which commonly held convictions that had underpinned the evangelical missionary movement were questioned or discredited. The women of this study, however, should not be judged by this altered worldview that took half of the twentieth century to make its imprint on national policy and psyche. They should, more appropriately, be credited with their vision of a better world, their desire to participate fully in bringing it about, and, finally, their actually leaving the familiar and secure for the unknown and arduous. Kenneth Scott Latourette, Yale historian, thus described the missionary's complex position:

Bigoted and narrow they frequently were, occasionally superstitious, and sometimes domineering and serenely convinced of the superiority of Western culture and of their own particular form of Christianity. When all that can be said in criticism of the missionaries has been said, however, and it is not a little, the fact remains that nearly always at considerable and very often at great sacrifice they came to China, and in unsanitary and uncongenial surroundings, usually with insufficient stipends, often at the cost of their own lives or of lives that were dearer to them than their own, labored indefatigably for an alien people who did not want them or their message. Whatever may be the final judgment on the major premises, the methods, and the results of the missionary enterprise, the fact cannot be gainsaid that for sheer altruism and heroic faith here is one of the bright pages in the history of the race.

Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1929), pp. 824-825.