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Biblewomen from Londonto China: the transnationalappropriation of a femalemission ideaValerie GriffithsPublished online: 08 Jul 2008.

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Women’s History ReviewVol. 17, No. 4, September 2008, pp. 521–541

ISSN 0961–2025 (print)/ISSN 1747–583X (online)/08/040521–21 © 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/09612020802200377

Biblewomen from London to China: the transnational appropriation of a female mission idea

Valerie Griffiths

Taylor and Francis LtdRWHR_A_320204.sgm10.1080/09612020802200377Women’s History Review0961-2025 (print)/1747-583X (online)Original Article2008Taylor & Francis174000000September 2008ValerieGriffithsvalgriff@ntlworld.com

Ellen Ranyard’s 1857 mission project for metropolitan Biblewomen suggests that the use of‘native agency’ in Christian work overseas was also applied as a solution to the neediestareas of central London. Meanwhile, early Protestant mission efforts to reach segregatedwomen in China and start schools for girls often drew on the help of selected villageBiblewomen. The next step was to train such co-workers more systematically and educatewomen in the churches more generally. Mission approaches to such female Bible schoolingare analysed via vignettes of Baptist and China Inland Mission women activists in bothsouth and north China. By the 1920s, the production of a phonetic Chinese script greatlyincreased the accessibility of the Bible, while tertiary education emerged for the more gifted.The significant number of women evangelists in the fast-growing church in China todaypoints to the strength of the Christian female educational and evangelistic legacy firstembodied in Chinese Biblewomen.

Introduction

According to

Tianfeng

, the official monthly organ of the Three Self Patriotic Churches,there were 7908 women evangelists in China in 2005.

1

It is not clear whether these haveall evolved directly from the first Biblewomen of the mid nineteenth century, butexamining their history should provide some clues.

Tianfeng

also reported that the 548women pastors at work today constituted a quarter of all pastors, while there were 920

Valerie Griffiths is a retired missionary and Bible college lecturer based in Guildford, UK. She served with theOverseas Missionary Fellowship in Japan and Singapore. She read theology at Oxford and also holds a ThMfrom Regent College, Vancouver, Canada. She is the author of

Not Less Than Everything

(Monarch, 2004), onwomen missionaries in China, and translated the autobiography of best-selling Japanese author Ayako Miura intoEnglish. Correspondence to: Valerie Griffiths, 8 Ellis Avenue, Onslow Village, Guildford GU2 7SR, UK. Email:valgriff@ntlworld.com

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female elders. A similar number of women leaders may well be attached to the unreg-istered churches. This article attempts to trace the history of Biblewomen in Chinafrom their beginnings to the 1920s, while also probing possible links with their urbancounterparts of mid-Victorian London.

As the early Biblewomen were usually illiterate, we can unfortunately only read theirstories now through the missionaries they worked with. Kwok Pui-lan’s book,

ChineseWomen and Christianity 1860–1927

, is invaluable to Western researchers as she hasbeen able to access a great deal more material in Chinese unavailable to the English-speaking world.

2

Rich UK archival resources on missions and transnational femaleeducation retain largely untapped research potential on China.

3

Biblewomen have been used widely in many different countries, but to isolate themfrom their own specific context is to ignore significant differences between them. India,with its complicated history of colonialism, empire and expatriate officials, had its ownpatterns of local culture and religion, in the midst of which the growing churchesestablished themselves. The situation of British missionaries within the British Empireat that time was inevitably influenced by the ‘Raj’, sometimes positively, as whenChristian business people backed up the local churches, and sometimes negatively.

In China, by contrast, imperial power had been vested for a thousand years in theManchu dynasty. By the nineteenth century Western countries were scrambling forland and trade in the Far East. China reacted by keeping its borders closed to allforeigners, only permitting a limited number to reside for a few months each winterin the business section of Canton (Guanzhou), spending the rest of the year in thePortuguese island colony of Macao. However, the Chinese were unable to prevent thedevelopment of the opium trade from India, which brought in huge revenues to Britainbut addiction and consequent destitution to millions of Chinese families. After theOpium Wars, under the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, foreign military and political pres-sure forced China to open five Treaty ports to foreign residents, and this was relaxedfurther under the Treaty of Tientsin in 1858.

4

In consequence when the first Protestant missionaries arrived in 1843, they were fewin number, extremely vulnerable and unsure how they would be received. The Chinesehad every reason to be hostile. But missionaries, especially in the China Inland Mission(CIM), were now aligning with the Chinese against the opium trade, distancing them-selves as far as possible from Britain and her harmful monopoly. As CIM moved inlandin the 1870s, they came to rely on Chinese law for protection if necessary. They mightturn to the local mandarin for help if they were illegally attacked, but did not appeal tothe British embassy or demand reparations from the Chinese in cases of arson orrobbery, or even after the Boxer rebellion.

5

While it is difficult to generalise, most missionaries recognised that China was so vastin population and area that the Chinese Christians would need to be involved as soonas possible if the churches were to become independent of foreign support. At the sametime, some foreign mission boards felt their own envoys should have the same educa-tion as men did for British and American churches: university degrees, ministerialtraining and ordination. It took years. A decade later, however, missionary societieswere asking for ordinary people to go out as evangelists—degrees were not needed for

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communicating with most of the population. They needed people so committed totheir faith that they longed to share it with others, people like the Methodist lay preach-ers and London City Missioners back in Britain.

6

Building on the extensive use of ‘lay’people which had begun nearly a century earlier, and included women, nineteenth-century British churches increasingly mobilised lay members to visit the urban workingclasses with whom they were losing touch in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution.By 1862, a third of the agents of the Town Missionary and Scripture Readers’ Associa-tion were women.

7

It was felt that China as well as London needed such people.However, while the Christian message was for all people, the women who made up halfthe population of China rarely appeared outside their homes.

In China, men and women seemed, to early Western observers, to live in separateworlds. The women were largely confined to their homes and courtyards, often evenwithout windows looking out onto the streets. From birth girls were seen as a financialburden to their families. They had freedom to run about until four or five years of agewhen the majority had their feet bound—which left them barely able to walk on theirdeformed and crushed feet for the rest of their lives (though one Western doctorseemed to think foot-binding was not a major problem).

8

Unbound feet made a good marriage unlikely, and destined women to a life of hardlabour and poverty, so parents who cared for their daughter’s happiness made sure theycomplied with custom. Many marriages were arranged in infancy and the girl trans-ferred to her future home as soon as she could be useful to her future mother-in-law,generally by early adolescence and without being consulted. Sometimes large extendedfamilies resulted, where a wealthy man could have several wives living together.Geraldine Guinness and her colleague were invited into sixteen homes in one day andfound no fewer than 500 people ready to talk and listen to the message they brought.

9

Girls were considered incapable of learning, so that while a few, with brothers to help,might master the 3–4000 Chinese characters needed in order to read, the challengemeant almost all women were illiterate. Westerners who saw the situation were deeplyconcerned for the women.

10

When Christian pioneer Robert Morrison returned to Britain in 1824, after sixteenyears in Guanzhou and Macao, he had already seen the Anglo-Chinese School for boyslaunched in Malacca. His concern for girls’ inclusion also reflected growing pressure inBritain to establish some form of basic education for everyone. Now Morrison pleadedfor a society to be founded to enable single women to contact Chinese women and girls,even if it still had to be outside China itself at that stage. To that end, he gathered a smallgroup of young women in his home in Hackney and began teaching them Chinesethree times a week ‘for the purpose of engaging in the education of Pagan females;—this was an object which Dr. Morrison had much at heart, and which he strenuouslylaboured to promote’.

11

It must have seemed a forlorn hope, but two of his studentseach subsequently spent twenty years founding girls’ schools in the East: Maria TarnDyer in Penang, Malacca and Singapore, and Mary Ann Aldersey in Batavia (Java) andNingbo, China.

12

It was also Morrison who encouraged Maria Newell to start girls’ schools in Malaccain 1827.

13

Newell, seemingly the first Caucasian single woman missionary to go east

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of India, probably learnt some Chinese from Mary Ann Aldersey.

14

The LondonMissionary Society (LMS) accepted Newell as a member, but no other single womenfor another thirty-three years. Within two years Maria and her colleague, MaryWallace, had started 8–10 small schools under national teachers to cater for Malays,Chinese and Portuguese. Missionaries struggled with the Chinese language, and Malay/Jawi was much simpler for those working in Java, Singapore and Malacca. The Britishand Foreign School Society (BFSS) provided some support to Mary Wallace for the firstyear, and school materials—‘books, stationery, school paraphernalia, thimbles, cotton,(knitting) needles’—but evidently more was needed.

15

The Society for Promoting Female Education in the East (SPFEE): the first schools for Chinese girls

Ten years later, in 1834, David Abeel returned from China to make an appeal similarto Morrison’s.

16

Within a couple of weeks the first women’s missionary society wasstarted to enable single women to go overseas and, initially, to contact women living inChina and India. Its final title was The Society for Promoting Female Education in theEast (SPFEE), sometimes shortened to the Female Education Society (FES). Theirpurpose was to facilitate ‘pious and well-educated persons’ who could initiate andsuperintend schools for girls, and also, significantly, train and encourage nationalteachers, hoping through education to reach the mothers as well as the daughters.Within the school curriculum the Bible took first place (as it did in most British schoolsat that time) and they hoped the pupils would ‘come to a belief in Christ as theirSaviour’. In addition, ‘all other useful knowledge could be imparted’ where relevant.This included reading and writing, arithmetic, hygiene and cleanliness, sewing (theirChinese clothes) and Chinese embroidery (as a means of supporting themselves ifnecessary in the future). In cultures where people’s lives were controlled by supersti-tion, they also taught some astronomy. Most of these subjects were also basic in Britishschools.

17

China still remained closed to foreigners at that point, but in the next twelve years,as requests for help came from South-East Asia and beyond, young and not so youngteachers from Britain, Basel, Geneva and Berlin began to fan out across the world to theMalay States, Java, Borneo, Singapore, Macao, India, Ceylon, Asia Minor and Egypt,and then to South Africa and Syria. At one point SPFEE had a wider geographicalspread than any other missionary society in Britain. The committee was extraordinarilyflexible. They were willing to process people for other groups in Europe, regardless ofwhich church they belonged to. They assisted their own agents (who were compara-tively few) financially in their initial outfit, fares and school materials. Salaries camefrom various sources. The SPFEE also made grants to many other schools, and toselected children and national staff.

The distinguished vice presidents (all titled ladies) and committee took their respon-sibilities very seriously. The SPFEE applicants, whatever their previous experience,were sent to the early teacher training colleges run by the BFSS and the Home andColonial School Society (HCSS). There they spent 8–10 weeks for assessment and

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help. The short courses were designed to certify teenage school monitors. Under theLancasterian method, most student teachers already had several years’ experience asyoung monitors now that elementary education was being driven forward in Britain.

18

The younger SPFEE women were sent to assist missionary wives in their small schools.Older women might be starting one or more new schools alongside missionary work inits early stages. There were rarely more than two Western women in any one school andsometimes they had to supervise local teachers, handling several schools in differentlanguages.

Boarding schools were necessary overseas when girls could not walk far in public.Sometimes escorts had to chaperone them. But if Chinese girls were considered ‘inca-pable of learning’, there was little incentive to go to school. The wealthy were apathetic,and sometimes SPFEE could only get the poorest to attend by paying them to come,and providing food and clothing. In these cases they tried to get legal agreement fromthe parents that the girls should stay for a specified period;

19

they were usually laterwithdrawn by their parents at ten or eleven years of age to be locked up till marriage,but where there were orphans, they stayed on as helpers until marriage. The Singaporeschool even had a wedding dress they could pass round as needed!

The driving force of the SPFEE was reaching women through evangelism, and oncethey had contact with the girls, they hoped to befriend their mothers. In SingaporeMaria Tarn Dyer, formerly in Robert Morrison’s Chinese class, started the ChineseGirls’ School in 1842 and asked the SPFEE for a teacher. Miss Grant was there for tenyears, supported by a group of ladies in Huddersfield,

20

and then Sophia Cooke tookover in 1854, heading the school for no less than forty-two years. Now known asSt Margaret’s, it is probably the oldest Chinese girls’ school still functioning today. Asthe parents were not interested in educating their daughters, Sophia Cooke’s numbersincreased through taking orphans and abandoned children. The police took her somethey had rescued from potential slavery. She visited homes, befriended mothers andstarted Bible studies. Later her senior girls ran a Ragged School for daygirls in thetown—service to others was an important part of their training. There were weeklymeetings for the girls who had left school and married. Sophia also provided a meetingplace for the Chinese fathers—the first Chinese church in Singapore. (The Cathedralonly catered for expatriates.)

21

These Christian schools springing up in Asian cities contacted comparatively fewchildren, given the size of the populations, but they produced some of the first literatewomen in their history, and their education and training wielded a powerful influenceon those around them. The boys’ schools had similar goals of raising up Christian lead-ers but did not make the same impact. Male graduates moved into family businesses,fulfilling their duty to their parents. The girls married, passing on their faith and educa-tion to their children and neighbours. They became effective evangelists at the grassroots, bolstering the fledgling churches where they existed.

In 1874 Miss Houston was seconded from the Singapore school to run the ChineseGirls’ school in Fuzhou in south China. In addition, she also started receiving some ofthe orphaned graduates from the Singapore school to train as Biblewomen. At a timewhen the South China churches had few Christian women, some 200 of Sophia’s girls

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went there, marrying pastors and church workers and becoming valuable, educated co-workers with their husbands. (In China, virtually all women married.) When theFuzhou Anglicans sent two local couples on a pioneer mission to Korea in 1885, bothwives came from Sophia’s school, thus spreading the Singapore institution’s influenceeven further.

22

Ellen Ranyard and the ‘Missing Link’ in London

The term ‘Bible Readers’ was used occasionally in China in the mid nineteenth century,but the word ‘Biblewomen’ emerged roughly simultaneously in London, China andIndia in the late 1850s, raising the question of who used it first. Ellen Ranyard inLondon in 1857 provides a starting point. Ranyard was a woman of her time, caughtup in the class structures of her period, but deeply concerned for the roughest andpoorest areas of the city. Her group of middle-class friends shared her compassion forthe destitute, but were too far removed from them socially to give direct help. Neitherthe male London City Missioners nor the middle-class church visitors (who includedmany women) could access the worst areas.

Ellen later identified three factors that contributed to a solution, though drawn fromwidely different sources. She worked closely with the BFBS and wrote several books onthe Bible, including

The Book and its Story

, a history of the Bible Society for the youngon the occasion of its Jubilee in 1852. In 1857, she began producing a monthly period-ical,

The Book and its Mission

, promoting the Society’s worldwide work.

23

She believedthat if people read the Bible and lived by its principles, their lives could be changed. Butas the men were away in the daytime and money was short, male colporteurs who triedto sell Bibles from door to door among the poor met with little success. Unhappy withthe wholesale handing out of charity, Ellen was convinced (like many middle-classVictorians) that people only truly valued what they paid for. As many of the poorearned seasonal money in the hop fields, she reflected, if they could learn the disciplineof saving little by little for what they wanted, they could achieve some control over theirlives. But she still needed to find a way of connecting with poor women in homes sodestitute that they would have nothing to do with middle-class people.

While the solution which emerged seems simple enough with hindsight, it is stilloften ignored. She called it ‘native agency’, though she does not explain it. Pierce Beavercomments that in the nineteenth century the term denoted the mobilising of nationalson the mission field, including national pastors and all kinds of indigenous workerstrained and employed in the work of evangelism and church-planting, includingwomen.

24

In India the missionary women, like ‘the ladies’ in London, found it veryhard to reach women and children enclosed in the zenanas. However, in 1851 the‘Normal School for Christian Female Teachers, English and Native’ was launched inCalcutta.

25

At first most of the girls were Anglo-Indian, but when they graduated asteachers, they were invited into the zenanas much more readily than the missionariesand could get closer to the zenana women than the missionaries could. Peopleresponded best to those with whom they had something in common. The Anglo-Indianwomen proved to be a ‘missing link’ between the Indians and the missionaries.

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Ellen was also influenced by Pastor Theo Fliedner and his wife in Germany who hadestablished a training centre at Kaisersworth in 1836 to equip deaconesses to help thepoor, sick, orphaned and handicapped as nurses and teachers. Over twenty years,these women had established other centres in Europe and a hundred bases acrossthe world.

26

Significantly, after spending time at Kaisersworth in 1851, FlorenceNightingale commented that ‘It was the more remarkable because many of theDeaconesses had been only peasants—none were gentlewomen when I was there’.

27

Inother words, Fliedner was training and mobilising country girls, rather than themiddle classes.

For Ellen these factors came together. If she could find committed Christian womenfrom the poorest areas, they might well identify with their neighbours because theyshared so much in common. ‘Marion B.’ was willing to try, and proved a great success.Ranyard was finally convinced that only such ‘able and pious women’ from the samesocial class should be used as ‘agents’ to visit in the poorest areas, with the support, helpand encouragement of ‘the ladies’. In the tightly structured Victorian class system, thesefemale ‘native agents’ became the ‘missing link’ between the rich and the poor.

28

‘Thefloor could be scrubbed by a good “woman” better than by a pious “lady”’, noted Ellen.‘Yet the wealthy lady can provide the scrubbing-brush, and the soap and materials forsoup, and supplies of clothing.’

29

The agents were given training over the course of three months in the Bible, the PoorLaw, and hygiene. Then they were assigned to specific areas across London and receivedten shillings a week, rising later to £32 per year—a sum that they might expect to earnelsewhere. There was no lack of applicants. Their primary goal was to sell Bibles for fivehours each day, collecting small weekly instalments of one penny, and only handingover the Scriptures when paid for in full. The Bible Society donated the Bibles andcontributed to the salaries, beginning with a gift of £5. Thus there was a close associa-tion between the two organisations, BFBS and Ranyard’s Home and Domestic Missionlaunched in 1857. As Ellen summed it up, ‘The Bible Society is considered to have a fulland strong hold on their allegiance. They are pre-eminently BIBLEWOMEN in a waythat they would not have been had their service been enlisted merely as Female CityMissioners.’

30

At the start, she used a variety of spellings and terms: Bible-Woman,Biblewoman, female Bible missionary and Bible agent.

31

The term ‘Biblewomen’certainly identified them primarily with the Bible Society and selling Bibles, but theywere also to explain the Bible and the Christian message, so evangelism and teachingwere included.

By the 1860s the American Bible Society was employing ‘Biblewomen’ to visitArmenian homes in Constantinople and several mission stations across Turkey weretraining them.

32

Ellen’s concept spread rapidly and within 2–3 years most towns andcities in Britain had developed something similar. From November 1859 to 1860 thenumber of Biblewomen in the Ranyard Bible Mission increased across London alonefrom 35 to 137. Ten years later there were 234 such agents, and the Ranyard Missionbegan adding trained nurses to help with the sick. The agents encouraged women to gettogether weekly, and later introduced them to Mission meetings where the Bible wastaught and explained. There were many church groups visiting the Victorian poor

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giving out tracts or offering social help of various kinds, but Ellen claimed that only theRanyard Mission brought the Bible and daily life together effectively. Her Biblewomencame alongside the poor with a primary focus on the Bible, but also a concern for thegeneral well-being of the families, with ongoing contact, care and encouragement fromthe area agents who became their friends.

33

‘Native Agency’ in India and China

Calcutta was a far cry from London in the 1850s, when ships took two or three monthsto make the journey. Was it likely that the concept of using the local Anglo-Indian girlsalso influenced Ellen in London? Maybe. Her monthly periodical would have kept herin touch with the worldwide Bible Society work. As the Indian Normal School emergedin 1851, the Calcutta committee recognised their need for wider support and contactedthe Hon. Mary Jane Kinnaird in London. At their request she launched the AuxiliaryLondon Committee of the Zenana Bible and Medical Mission (ZBMM) that same year,a women’s mission to India to train local women as evangelists and national teachersfor the zenanas and schools. Mary Kinnaird had also been closely involved with theSPFEE as a vice president as early as 1845. Her husband Arthur and the Earl ofShaftesbury had wide Christian contacts and now both joined the Ranyard MissionCouncil of Reference. These devout pioneering mission networks in mid-VictorianLondon, both international and metropolitan, seem to have been intimately intercon-nected and overlapping. The concept of ‘native agency’ could well have travelled backto London from India through these committees. But the term ‘Biblewoman’ itselfprobably originated with Ellen Ranyard in 1857.

It also becomes clear that far from being satisfied with ‘native agency’ in the poorestareas of London alone, Ellen’s link with the Bible Society’s worldwide work alerted herto the need to reach out to women overseas. By 1864, she was also in touch withHudson Taylor, passionately concerned for China. Ranyard offered financial supportfor two Chinese Biblewomen to help the overstretched Mrs Lord (originally an SPFEEteacher) in the Treaty port of Ningbo.

34

In addition to running an orphanage, MrsLord was working with a Chinese Christian friend, Mrs Tsiu, and many homes werewelcoming their visits.

Yet another glimpse of Ranyard’s transnational ties and influence comes in the laterreflections on fifty years of service in China of American Southern Baptist missionary,Rev. R. H. Graves. He had arrived in 1856, the year before the Ranyard Bible Missionwas started:

I was among the first to introduce the work of Biblewomen among the Chinese.My mother and aunt (a Methodist) were much interested in the account ofMrs. Ranyard’s work in London and my aunt sent $50 to be used in trying to secureChristian women who would visit the homes and try to bring the Gospel to their ownsex in China. We had two women, widows of our preachers, who could read andseemed fitted to do this work. I had them come to me weekly and report their experi-ences, while I studied a portion of the Scriptures with them and urged them to reachothers. I also told them how to answer the objections which the women made toChristianity.

35

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Indeed, the late 1850s marked the beginning of women’s work as a distinct departmentof Protestant mission work in South China. While the spread of Biblewomen in Britainwas remarkable, the concept had already reached China by 1860.

The Use of Single Women by CIM

In 1865, Hudson Taylor finally accepted that the other existing missions were not goingto expand fast. To reach Chinese women in their homes, far more single women wereneeded and that would require a new mission. The personal experience of his wifeMaria and her older sister Burella reinforced this for him. As teenagers, they had joinedMary Ann Aldersey as teachers at Ningbo. After a childhood in Penang and Singapore,they were fluent in Chinese and had been able to visit many of the local women, sharingthe Bible with them. When the China Inland Mission was launched, Hudson Taylorwas willing to accept every man and woman who felt called by God to serve in Chinaand had the necessary spiritual gifts. The use of single women abroad in particularbrought him severe public criticism. Although not eligible for executive positions, thewomen were all equal members with the men, an egalitarianism empowering for bothsingle and married. They were all likewise expected to learn Chinese, wear Chineseclothes, live alongside the Chinese and work together to spread the Christian message.

When the first CIM party embarked for China in 1866, it included seventeen adultsand four children; there were two couples, five single men and no less than

eight

singlewomen.

36

It was the largest party of foreigners ever to land there. There were then alleg-edly only thirteen unmarried Western women in the whole of China, six of them inHong Kong. Interestingly, Jane McLean from Inverness was already described as a‘Biblewoman’ in the CIM register, though the term did not spread as widely in Britainas it did overseas. She had actually trained at the Mildmay Deaconess home started byWilliam Pennefather in London in 1860 and modelled on the Kaisersworth deacon-esses. The day the women left Shanghai to go inland to areas where there were nochurches or Christians, they set off in Chinese jackets and trousers, their Victoriandresses packed away in the cellars as their fitted bodices were indecent to the Chinese.From now on their task was to identify with the Chinese as much as possible.

For the next few years the missionaries were learning the language and adaptingto Chinese daily life. Women did not appear alone on the streets. It made sense toemploy a local woman to assist not only with cooking but as a contact with the localpeople; she would accompany them outside if necessary, enable them to learn more oflocal life, and especially help their neighbours to understand them, removing fear,suspicion and rumours. As churches grew, some of the Christian women shared inthe evangelism and teaching, as Mrs Tsiu did for Mrs Lord in Ningbo, and in thisway the first Biblewomen emerged in China. With the growth of the churches, menwere involved as pastors, preachers, evangelists and colporteurs selling literature. TheBiblewomen were always regarded as lowest in rank in the churches. There was nopublic education programme until 1907, so illiteracy prevailed for the next forty years.As the younger women did not go out on the streets and were busy caring for children,most of the Biblewomen were older, and often widows, able to leave the chores to their

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daughters-in-law. While some missions would work in one area or province, fromthe beginning Taylor had prayed for two people to put into each of the nine westernprovinces. Thus from the 1870s churches began emerging in West China. TheirBiblewomen worked either with a missionary or with the local church, and might workvoluntarily or be paid.

Training Biblewomen in South China

As the churches grew, they were full of first-generation Christians who needed a greatdeal of teaching and training at different levels. Here, American Baptist Adele Fieldeproved a pivotal mission figure, despite a traumatic beginning.

37

In 1865, at the age oftwenty-seven, she followed her fiancé to Thailand, only to discover he had died severalweeks earlier, leaving her a single woman on her own in the Baptist Mission. The auto-cratic senior missionary in charge treated her as a widow, but had no idea how tohandle a strong-minded, outspoken spinster. Fielde began learning Chinese, hoping tostart a training school for Chinese women in the small church in Bangkok. But it washard, discouraging, isolated work with only a handful of people. After seeking a littlecompany in the expatriate community to the consternation of her strict, devoutcolleagues, she was despatched back to the USA in disgrace in 1872 as a ‘card-playing,dancing missionary’ much too involved with ‘the world’.

38

However, en route she was able to visit Swatow (Shantou) in South China, confront-ing the phenomenon of thousands of Chinese women living ‘behind the walls’, andgrowing numbers of new churches. She also came across Christian families who weredefying Chinese culture by leaving their daughters’ feet unbound, husband and wifeeating together at the same table, and bringing their children to church. Here indeedwere families endeavouring to live out their faith in a new culture. She could train someof these women as evangelists to take the Gospel to their own people.

39

Given her previ-ous problems, the senior Baptist missionary there discussed the matter carefully withher, laying down boundaries for behaviour, and at the same time affirmed her and gaveher the self-respect, support and welcome she needed. She returned to the UnitedStates with a fresh vision, begging the Baptist Missionary Union to give her anotherchance. They took some persuading.

40

Fortunately, however, US Baptist women weretrying to start their own independent missionary society at that very time, to theconsternation of the male Board, uneasy about possible diversion of funds. Anxiousto maintain good relationships with the women, the Board decided to allow Adele(who, of course, already spoke Chinese) to return to Swatow within months to trainBiblewomen in the local church.

41

‘I resolved that I would teach them and preparefrom among them a class of evangelists who should go out and labour in the villages.’

42

In 1877 there was a major missionary conference in Shanghai.

43

Missionary womenwere present for the first time and four were invited to write papers on the women’swork, although men had to read them out, as Western women did not yet speak inpublic. Yet change was in the air. No women at all had been present at the first inter-national conference on missions held in Liverpool in 1860.

44

In the subsequent discus-sion in Shanghai, Adele spontaneously stood up to explain what she had been doing.

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‘This caused a flutter’, with one person quoting 1 Corinthians about women keepingsilent, and the chairman vacating his chair in protest. However, ‘she was a woman ofcommanding presence, a good speaker, and waited for the breeze to die down’ beforeexplaining what she had been doing.

45

The hundred women in her church, of whom only two could read, were scattered invillages over seven districts. Staying in the local chapels, she began to visit every one ofthem, getting to know them and their family circumstances and whether they could beaway from home for training. She would not accept anyone with young children, orwithout her husband’s permission. This suggests most of them would have been overfifty years of age. Widows did not remarry, so it was easier for them to come. She beganwith thirty-three women, of whom half returned home after a few months, though theycould still share what they had learned in their local chapels. Sixteen showed more abil-ity and were used as Biblewomen for a year. She began by teaching them one Biblelesson at a time, and then going out with them as they passed it on in the villages. Adelecontinued:

I never send them to places where I have not myself been … they bring me a report oftheir work every two months, and it is only by having a knowledge of the locality andits people that I can properly understand the report … The constant personal super-intendence … is of the utmost importance or there will be misdirected effort, waste ofmoney, discouragement and failure.

She believed that Chinese women by their character were eminently suited to evange-lism: ‘They are destined to become a great power in the future evangelization ofChina’.

46

Adele had begun with ‘five old, wrinkled, ignorant women’. She advisedpeople attempting similar work not to wait for suitable people to come:

Make use of whatever God has provided. The women may be old, blind, bound-footed, degraded, stupid, yet if God has stamped them as His, if they show by theirlives that they have been called by Him into His church, then take what He has givenyou and make the best of them, and He will afterward furnish you with better.

47

Twenty years later, in addition to a team of eleven national trained teachers staffing theBiblewomen’s Training School, 500 women had passed through the school, and thengone out in pairs to the villages as Bible teachers and evangelists.

48

By 1900 there wereforty women’s training centres across China run by various Protestant missions.

49

Tenyears after Adele’s death in 1916, the Baptist Foreign Mission belatedly hailed heras ‘the mother of our Bible women and the mother of our Bible schools’ and saidshe had ‘done a man’s job’.

50

Graves’s earlier comment showed that the concept ofBiblewomen reached China before Adele Fielde did, but China is a large country andshe was probably the first to organise their systematic training in South China.

Fielde’s equipping of churchwomen to communicate with the illiterate was espe-cially significant as there was still no government education for girls. Those who werenot Christians still saw no point in female education. A Chinese proverb claimed that‘The ignorance of a woman is her virtue’. Missionary wives and single women did whatthey could in their homes, but schools often came and went with the missionaries. Withgrowing numbers in the churches, more children from Christian families needed

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V. Griffiths

education in order to access the Bible. Here, Eva French and Mildred Cable in NorthChina made a notable mark.

CIM Education for Women and Schooling for Girls

51

Although change was in the air as the nineteenth century moved to a close in east andsouth China, it was still slow. While other missions were well established in the east,CIM was still pioneering in the western provinces, which were more backward. Somesecular Chinese began talking about modernising and were executed for their views.Eva French first reached China with CIM in 1894.

52

After some months of languagestudy, she crossed the country by boat and cart for three months to reach Shanxi prov-ince in the north. While a senior missionary couple worked in the town, Eva paid anelderly local woman to travel with her and help her make contacts visiting the villages.Travelling by donkey in Chinese clothes, she was immersed in local life, sleeping on theheated brick platforms alongside opium addicts, listening to the chatter at night,coming, she felt, to understand the women at a deep level. With time, as she becameknown and welcomed over a wide area, Christian village women ‘had come to befellow-workers and were her frequent companions on evangelistic trips’.

53

Finally, inthe 1900 Boxer rebellion, when the order went out from the empress to kill all foreign-ers, the Shanxi Christians, both Chinese and Western, were targeted: many sufferedand died. Eva and her colleagues fled, pursued for six weeks in the extreme summerheat before they reached safety.

In 1902, after home leave, and joined by Mildred Cable, a new junior worker, Evawas back in China in the same place. One of her first tasks was to visit Christiansover a wide area, listening to their stories of attack, torture and death at the hands ofthe Boxers.

54

It must have been a traumatic beginning for Mildred. Both women werekeen to start travelling through the villages again but, with the post-Boxer surge ofinterest in the Christian faith, could not possibly respond to all the requests for visitsand teaching. If they stepped back from the front line, however, they could train othersto take their place, because they thought what China most needed at this critical timewas more local, trained Christian women to serve as teachers and evangelists. Therewere still so few women in the churches compared with men, and men had more accessto education. Their rambling Chinese home in Shanxi was big enough to make a startin a modest way, with a couple of rooms for each venture, targeting both girls andwomen.

55

Mildred Cable’s girls’ boarding school ultimately took pupils from five differentprovinces, and subsequently produced a teacher-training group from the senior girls.It was properly housed once a large gift ‘for buildings’ arrived from a benefactor inEngland. As regards the adults, Cable and French began by inviting groups of marriedwomen to come for around three weeks of study.

56

(They did not refer much to‘Biblewomen’, perhaps because they aimed to teach all women.) They tried to organisethem according to ability, knowledge, and skill in passing on to others what they hadlearnt. As group followed group, they soon discovered those with a potential whichcould be developed. Some of the more gifted who were free to do so were switched to

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the adjacent girls’ school for broader studies.

57

In 1910, Westminster Chapel inLondon sent £450 for a new building for the Women’s Training School, which meantlonger courses as well as short ones became possible. Women might start with twentydays of training in their home churches, followed by a ten-day course at the BibleSchool. A second group could take a two-year course of further Bible training, whichincluded practical training in evangelism and teaching. The most gifted continued theirstudies while superintending the work of the less experienced, training others andevangelising in the town and villages. They travelled in pairs, renting rooms to stay inthe villages and Eva met with them regularly to help, encourage and pray with them. Itmarked a new stage in the churches as the local Christians took over responsibility forwider evangelism from the missionaries.

Twenty years later, the governor of Shanxi province began to recognise the need forpublic schooling for girls but he needed teachers, and the only educated women andgirls available came from the scattered mission schools.

58

He was ready to employ everyliterate teenage girl he could get. While the junior school continued under Chinesestaff, Mildred’s senior school fell apart for the moment. A thousand girls had beenthrough her schools in twenty years and 130 of her graduates were already teachingsome 5000 children across five provinces. By then, the early 1920s, Eva had seen 850largely illiterate women going through her training school, and then serving in theirlocal churches and villages. Before they moved on to the next stage of their lives,Mildred wrote an article in the

Chinese Recorder

pleading for Chinese women to receivefuller recognition for their gifts in the national churches.

59

Chinese Women Evangelists and Teachers

In 1907 the Centenary Missionary Conference in Shanghai (which celebrated 100 yearssince the arrival of Robert Morrison in China) produced statistics for

all

the Protestantchurches that year. They listed 345 ordained national pastors (presumably male), 5722unordained church workers (also presumably male) and 887 Biblewomen in a baptisedChristian community of 178,261. No volunteers were enumerated, so presumably allthese others were supported financially. This suggests churches which were not highlyhierarchical, but had mobilised a large number of lay people.

But the worlds of men and women were still very different. In the early days it hadbeen difficult for women to go to church at all. They were shouted at and sneered at forbeing on the street. In church, they sat behind curtains or screens out of sight and oftenbehind the speaker, so saw and heard little. It was still inappropriate for the Chinesepastors to have contact with the women, even to the extent of not giving themcommunion directly in some churches, but only via other women; they left femalepastoral care entirely to the Chinese and missionary women, who then carried consid-erable responsibility.

60

Though Biblewomen still focused on evangelism and Bibleteaching in the women’s world, they were getting more structured training at variouslevels. While most women were still illiterate, efforts were made to help them to readand some used Mandarin written in the romanised alphabet. On the rare occasionswhen a girls’ school could function in tandem with a Bible school, as with Cable and

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French, there were great advantages. Jessie Gregg and Margaret King particularly tookfemale evangelism and education a stage further as the twentieth century advanced.

Jessie Gregg was a CIM member from the next-door province of Hopei (Zhili).61 Shewas passing through her colleagues’ institution when Mildred Cable invited her tospeak, and recognised Jessie’s ability to communicate with local women. Looking backlater, Gregg explained her immersion in local culture: ‘Giving myself up to finding outall I could about the Chinese woman in her home, sleeping with her, sharing her roomand living on Chinese food, I got to know her environment’.62 As a result, when theirnew school buildings gave them more space, Cable and French organised a five-daywomen’s residential conference in 1910 and invited Jessie Gregg back.63 In an era whenChinese women still rarely went outside their homes, they wondered who would come.

In the event, two days beforehand, thirteen unsprung wooden-wheeled carts carryingwomen unable to walk, clattered into the school grounds, followed the next day by atrain of thirty donkeys bringing more women, until 350 had arrived from miles around.With the local churchwomen, the Training School women and the schoolgirls all on thecompound, 500 women had gathered, most of them never having been out of theirvillages before. The local men bought food for them from the market as the womencould not go out in public, and the schoolgirls helped with stewarding and caring forthe babies. While the women from the Bible School could help lead small groups, JessieGregg gave the main addresses daily. The townspeople had never seen so many womenin one place before either, in what was an unforgettable week. When the Mission wasrepeated six years later in 1916, the Chinese undertook all the speaking themselves.64

This first Women’s Mission launched a new stage in work with Chinese women.65

Travel was still primitive at a speed of twenty miles a day and the railways were just beingbuilt. For the next fifteen years, Jessie spent three months in spring and autumn takingfive-day missions across no fewer than fifteen provinces of China, travelling 28,000miles by cart, mule litter, donkey, boat and the ubiquitous wheelbarrow for days at atime. By invitation she went from her home area south to Hunan Province, and fromthe eastern coast to the remote north-west province of Gansu between Mongolia andTibet, visiting a wide spread of denominations and missions, and found a warmwelcome from the local women everywhere. Jessie had spent so long with village womenthat she could take her examples from everyday events in their homes. After fifteen yearsof life in the country areas of China, she considered she was on their wavelength.66

She often travelled alone, but relied on each church she visited to pray, organise aprogramme and invite people. Congregations varied in size but could average 500, andin the process the local church members were learning how to share their faith withothers. This was valuable training for the young women and mothers who could notvisit the villages with the older Biblewomen or travel to the Bible schools for training.It also meant that as women were drawn out of their homes, their whole world wasenriched and expanded. This evangelistic and teaching work was the seedbed forBiblewomen in China as the churches spread beyond the cities. This is where ‘nativeagency’ took over, the ‘missing link’ between foreigner and national, where the localwomen immersed in their homes began to discover the Christian faith through ‘peoplelike themselves’.

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Margaret King (from Montreal) was also in CIM, reaching China in 1896, a year afterJessie Gregg. She was based in the large city of Yangzhou on the Great Canal, not farfrom the east coast.67 Unlike Jessie, Margaret spent her time visiting city women,though confined to their homes just as in the villages. While her medical training as anurse opened doors to both rich and poor, two Chinese women had a profound influ-ence on her life in these two directions. The first came from the upper classes, a groupnot easy for missionaries to contact.68 Mrs Fang established herself as Margaret’s‘Chinese mother’ and introduced her to the language, culture and etiquette of theupper classes. She insisted on giving Margaret a sedan chair to move around the city,and quality Chinese clothes to ease her way into loftier circles with the Christianmessage, even if she did spend her days on medical work and evangelism among thepoor in the back streets.

For that work, she came to depend on her second friend, Mrs Sie. Margaret wrotehome about her:

I wish you knew dear Mrs. Sie, the Bible-woman. Not that she knows the meaning ofthe word ‘Bible-women’. She is just in the position of a servant, getting less than twodollars a month, out of which she provides her food and other necessaries. She is overforty years of age and one of the holiest people I ever knew. I wish I served the Lordwith the singleness of purpose with which she does. She gives more than a tenth to theLord, month by month, and never misses an opportunity to witness for Him.69

Mrs Sie had known a better life but her son became an opium addict and reduced thefamily to destitution. Her small wage was earned in domestic work at the school whereMargaret lived, which she apparently combined with spending time helping Margaret.(It was said that people took more notice of what she said because they knew she wasnot paid for her preaching.) Mrs Sie was passionate about evangelism, and for the nexttwenty years travelled about the city, canals and villages with the Gospel as a co-workerand companion to Margaret. She built a small room (with the luxury of a woodenfloor!) on to her little village house so that Margaret could stay with her when awayfrom Yangzhou. Then she would call in friends, relatives and neighbours to hear themessage. She probably received all her ‘training’ from Margaret ‘on the job’, in amanner doubtless typical of some Biblewomen deeply committed to their faith whosimply surfaced with their desire to share the Christian message in the women’s world.Many served as volunteers. City churches established chapels and outreach points insmaller towns and villages where they could place church members—a lay couple ortwo trained Biblewomen to lead the group.70

Margaret King spent many years living on the premises as a companion to EmmieClough, who was in charge of Yangzhou girls’ school with its forty boarders. During theday, Margaret and Mrs Sie visited women, giving medical help to those who asked, orhad perhaps overdosed on opium. But living at close quarters with twenty youngschoolgirls enabled Margaret to relate to them also. She realised for the first time howcrucial schools could be if the girls made a personal Christian commitment while there.Gradually she was invited to speak to a wide spectrum of girls’ schools, moving easilyamong them regardless of denomination. Mrs Fang’s training stood her in good stead.She found herself drawn in both directions: with a calling to help and empower women

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who were poor, uneducated and needy, and yet with an open door before her to bringJesus to these girls who would be the future leaders of China.

As the Imperial Dynasty died and the new Republic came in, change was in the air,even from outside China. The North American women’s missionary societies, startedafter 1860 when the main societies refused to send out single women as missionaries,had always had a deep concern for women and girls in other countries. In 1911 theirleaders, Helen Montgomery and Lucy Peabody, encouraged groups of such femalesocieties to found Union Boards in America to develop and partly fund tertiary educa-tion colleges for women in India, Japan and China. Similar Union Boards were set upinside each country, providing Christian and interdenominational foundations.71 As aresult, Ginling College for women was opened in Nanjing in 1915, constituting, withthe North China Union Women’s College (1908) in Beijing, the only two tertiarycolleges for the whole of China.

Meanwhile in 1912, six different missions in China were almost ahead of the timeswhen they cooperated to found Nanjing Union Bible College for Women in the ancientsouthern capital of Nanjing, some sixty miles from Yangzhou.72 It offered further bibli-cal studies and training at tertiary level for high school graduates, beginning on a shoe-string with only four teachers, 15–20 students and poor premises. But they anticipatedthe strategic need for highly educated teachers, lecturers and church leaders in theimminent future. The girls travelled from six different provinces, many having beenconverted as a result of Margaret King’s school visits. Indeed, the College was keen totake advantage of King’s fluency in Chinese and her Bible-teaching and communicationskills with the older girls. Although she refused a later request to become principal,believing her primary calling was to evangelism alongside the Biblewomen, King didgive lectures there each year, still moving easily between the highly educated and thecompletely uneducated. When poor health forced Mrs Sie to retire at sixty, her placealongside Margaret was taken by Miss Nyi and some of the new graduates from NanjingBible College. Thus by the end of the First World War the formal Christian educationsystem developed for girls was bringing well-educated young Chinese women at alllevels from Bible schools to university into every area of church and secular life. In thisperiod the Young Women’s Christian Association also had a huge influence on city girlswhich cannot be dealt with here.73 Nevertheless, and despite missionary objections, theChinese church reflected the culture of the time: it was a man’s church, with pastors,church workers and male communicants far outnumbering women until halfwaythrough the twentieth century.

The Phonetic Script: new biblical literacy for women

The churches continued to expand, but illiteracy still dogged their progress, even whenthey tried to reduce Chinese writing to a thousand characters. With an innate ability to‘learn by repetition’, as they described it, and a lot of hard work, illiterate women hada competition in Gansu Province in 1916, learning books from the New Testamentby rote. Three women and a girl memorised the whole of Philippians, Colossians and1 and 2 Thessalonians. Others mastered one book or one chapter.74 But China had

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324 million illiterate women—still over 90% of the population. In 1917, there wererumours that Chinese scholars were working on a phonetic system to help them distin-guish different dialects in their studies, a strictly academic exercise for their own use.But when national church leaders heard about this, an officially recognised phoneticscript seemed ideal for the churches to adopt.75 The complicated Chinese charactersstill presented such a barrier to reading the Bible and other Christian literature that itlimited people’s understanding of their faith. When it was decided to put the Bible andhymnbook into this new script, Susie Garland, an Australian CIM missionary, wasgiven three years to supervise the project.76 She had already spent twenty-seven yearsin China in the remote north-west border province of Gansu (1500 miles and a three-month journey from Shanghai before the railways were built), devising (among otherthings) a Braille system in Chinese which would be widely used for the rest of thecentury.

The phonetics project was a major operation backed by all the churches. The scripthad to be fine-tuned; the Bible Society took over the printing; another group shoul-dered finance and distribution. For the first time typewriters could be used for theChinese language, but they had to be constructed. When the phonetic Bible wasfinished, posters were needed to advertise it, and then simple literacy materials to teachpeople to read. Here, Garland’s long years of experience at the grass roots in the villagesbore fruit. She also worked with the printers to introduce a revolutionary new three-colour technology, which people still talked about fifty years later. Twelve posters withBible quotations written in characters were introduced with the phonetic script along-side so that the new ‘readers’ could also read them. Even those who knew nothing aboutthe Bible still bought them to decorate their homes. The project also producedcoloured leaflets and scrolls, urging all primary schools to teach the phonetic script tothose who might only get two years of education. Villagers were truly astonished whentheir Christian neighbours suddenly learnt to read.

From that time on, each one who learnt was challenged to teach others. The averageuneducated person, even the elderly, could learn to read in a month. Eva French andMildred Cable’s church in Shanxi province claimed to be the first wholly literate churchin China. Church meetings and conferences and Bible schools were transformed. Thework of the Biblewomen took on new dimensions as they also became literate, readthe Bible for themselves and were able to develop their teaching. In Susie Garland’slarge province of Gansu, the churches then launched graded home Bible studies.77

Ninety-one women had done the first course by 1924, and sixty-four the second, whilethirty-one had done all four exams. Most were illiterate when they started, but manyby the end were moving on from the phonetic to the Chinese characters. The courseswere such a success that they enlarged and adjusted them for men as well, making themavailable for use in churches nationwide.

Conclusion

By the 1920s Christianity in China had made astonishing advances, in which femaleeducation and training played a notable part in equipping Chinese women leaders to

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spread the new faith. Half a century earlier, the Shanghai Conference figures for 1877listed ninety Biblewomen across China, of whom six were with CIM,78 but with a rapidexpansion in the recruitment of single women missionaries in the 1890s, the numberof Biblewomen also increased. Thirty years later, as we have seen, the 1907 CentenaryConference reported 887 Biblewomen at work. The 1922 National Christian Confer-ence was a landmark. Of the 1189 delegates, 565 were Chinese (a big increase comparedwith previous conferences), but that included only seventy-four Chinese women.Missionary women wrote to the Chinese Recorder protesting on their behalf.79 Thefollowing year, Mary Culler White, Principal of Nanjing Bible College, commented thatthe delegates in 1922 represented all denominations and almost every type of work.Among them were principals of schools, teachers, doctors, nurses, evangelists, homemissionaries, deaconesses, YWCA evangelists, church secretaries, members of mission-ary boards and women of wealth who were giving their leisure to some form of Christianwork and this was only four years after the first five women graduated from Ginling.80

White went on to appeal for more structured training and recognition, even licensingfor evangelists and Biblewomen. But though women had emerged from their homesinto public life, there were still only four women to every six men in the churches.

Much remains to be more fully researched—from 1920 onwards. In a small bookletpublished in 1999, five very elderly Biblewomen from the house churches told theirstories.81 They had been deeply committed to their congregations and to evangelism asyoung women, even under the Japanese occupation during the Second WorldWar. Some had served with their husbands in pioneer areas with few Christians. Butunder the communist regime they had lost everything except their faith. Many womenwere severely persecuted along with the men. In the absence of some of their husbandsfor twenty years or more, the women carried on undaunted. They brought up theirchildren, and kept the faithful together, teaching and encouraging them in terriblecircumstances. Their chronicler notes that the women who had major leadershiproles in the house churches were not usually referred to as ‘Pastor’ or ‘Elder’, butrather as ‘Biblewomen’, which recognises their gifts and calling, and the flexible, all-encompassing nature of their work.82

As was noted at the start, China now has 7908 women evangelists in the registeredchurches alone, in addition to 548 female pastors and 920 female elders.83 While thetitle ‘Biblewoman’ still carries associations of poor education, which may be why theterm is changing to ‘evangelist’, if the Biblewomen/evangelists had not faithfullyfulfilled their calling, the church in China might not be where it is today—one of thefastest growing in the world. As Kwok Pui-lan has concluded after analysing Chinesewomen and Christianity in the period on which this article, too, has broadly focused,1860–1927:

This study has led me to believe that feminist theology in a Third World context musttake into consideration women’s historical experience of Christianity. In the Chinesecase, Christian women have found in Christianity symbolic resources that give mean-ing to their lives and that empower women to struggle for dignity. Together with otherAsian women, they have witnessed to the potential of Christianity to liberate womenfrom the underside of history.84

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Notes1 [1] Tiangfeng (April 2005).2 [2] Kwok Pui-lan (1991) Chinese Women and Christianity 1860–1927 (Atlanta: Scholars Press).3 [3] The Archives of the Society for Promoting Female Education in the East (SPFEE) are held in

the Church Missionary Society (CMS) archives in Birmingham University Library. Theyinclude the very detailed SPFEE Minute Books from 1834 to 1886. The British Library holdsthe SPFEE monthly publication, the Female Missionary Intelligencer (1853–99) and EdwardSuter (1847) History of the SPFEE (London: Edward Suter), based on the early letters receivedfrom the teachers up to 1846. The China Inland Mission (CIM) and London Missionary Soci-ety (LMS—now Council for World Mission—CWM) archives are at the School of Orientaland African Studies (SOAS), London, as is China’s Millions (CM), CIM’s monthly magazine, avaluable source of primary material. See also the annual China Mission Year Book (1910–25)(Shanghai: Christian Literature Society) and the monthly Chinese Recorder and MissionaryJournal (CR) (1868–1950?) (Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press), both at SOAS, and A. J.Broomhall’s Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century (7 vols), now republished (2005) asThe Shaping of Modern China (SMC), 2 vols (Carlisle: Piquant).

4 [4] For background history see SMC, vol. I, pp. 46–47, 81–119.5 [5] Ibid., pp. 503–505.6 [6] SMC, p. 592.7 [7] Donald Lewis (1986) Lighten Their Darkness: the evangelical mission to working-class London,

1828–1860 (New York: Greenwood), p. 309 n. 8.8 [8] J. Dudgeon (1869) The Small Feet of Chinese Women, CR (September), pp. 93–96. See also CR

(February 1889), pp. 88–89, when Fuhkien churches were beginning to forbid foot-binding.9 [9] Joy Guinness (1949) Her Web of Time (London: CIM), p. 76.10[10] Those who question the negative Western view of Chinese women’s confined lives in the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries should read the accounts by the nieces and grand-daughters of earlier illiterate generations. See Jung Chang (1993) Wild Swans (London:Flamingo); Xinran (2002) The Good Women of China (London: QPD); Adeline Yen Mah(1997) Falling Leaves (Harmondsworth: Penguin); Pang-Mei Natasha Chang (1997) BoundFeet and Western Dress (London: Bantam). While Western women lived under their owncultural constraints, education and transport were already opening up opportunities forthem, giving them relative freedom to determine their own lives, as compared with Chinesewomen who could not even leave their homes.

11[11] E. Morrison (1839) Memoirs of Robert Morrison, vol. II (London: Longman, Orme), p. 32.12[12] Morrison, Memoirs, vol. II, p. 301; SPFEE, Minutes, AM2, 10 December 1846; E. Aldersey

White (1932) A Woman Pioneer in China: the life of Mary Ann Aldersey (London: LivingstonePress), pp. 12–14, 17–22, 28–71.

13[13] Morrison, Memoirs, vol. II, p. 405. Further details on these early teachers can be found inValerie Griffiths (2004) Not Less than Everything (Oxford: Monarch), ch. 1, East of India.

14[14] White, Woman Pioneer, pp. 11–12.15[15] CWM Archive, China, Malacca, Penang. Box 2, Folder 5, 1821–29.16[16] Suter, History, pp. 6–7; and for Abeel’s Appeal, pp. 261–265.17[17] Suter, History, Appendix C, pp. 275–281.18[18] The British Schools Museum at Hitchin, Hertfordshire, UK is revealing on mass education in

this period, including an original classroom for 300 pupils.19[19] Suter, History, p. 228; White, Woman Pioneer, p. 36.20[20] E. A. Walker (1899) Sophia Cooke (London: Elliott Stock), pp. 6–27.21[21] E. K. Bobby Sng (2003) In His Good Time, 3rd edn (Singapore: Bible Society), pp. 62–69.22[22] Walker, Sophia Cooke, p. 56; E. Stock (1899) History of the Church Missionary Society, vol. III

(London: CMS), p. 565. Further detail on this early period can be found in Griffiths, Not Less.23[23] Lewis, Lighten Their Darkness, pp. 220–223.

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540 V. Griffiths24[24] R. Pierce Beaver (1980) American Protestant Women in World Mission (Grand Rapids:

Eerdmans), pp. 119–120.25[25] J. C. Pollock (1958) Shadows Fall Apart (London: Hodder & Stoughton), pp. 14–18.26[26] Ellen Ranyard (1859) The Missing Link (New York: Robert Carte), pp. 284–285.27[27] Cecil Woodham-Smith (1950) Florence Nightingale (London: Constable), p. 91.28[28] Ranyard’s Missing Link was published in 1859, the same year as Darwin’s Origin of Species

popularised this term in a very different context!29[29] Ranyard, Missing Link, p. 275.30[30] Ibid., pp. 271–272.31[31] K. Cann, personal communication, 29 January 2008.32[32] Ruth Tucker (1985) The Role of Bible Women in World Evangelism, Missiology, XIII (2).33[33] F. K. Prochaska (1980) Women and Philanthropy (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 126–129.34[34] SMC, vol. I, p. 669.35[35] R. H. Graves (1907) Fifty Years of Service in South China, CR, 38 (February), p. 88.36[36] SMC, vol. I, pp. 699–705.37[37] F. B. Hoyt (1982) ‘When a Field Was Found Too Difficult for a Man, a Woman Should Be

Sent’: Adele Fielde in Asia, 1865–1890, The Historian, 44 (May), pp. 318–322; A. M. Fielde(1877) Records of the General Conference of Protestant Missions in China—Shanghai—1877(Shanghai), pp. 156–158. See also Ruth Tucker (1988) Guardians of the Great Commission(Grand Rapids: Zondervan), pp. 119–121.

38[38] Hoyt, ‘When a Field’, p. 320.39[39] Ibid., p. 322.40[40] Ibid., p. 323.41[41] It is interesting that two years later, in 1874, Miss Houston from Singapore moved to

the Fuzhou Girls’ School 300 miles to the north of Swatow to train the Singapore girls asBiblewomen, but they were young, and already educated (in Malay). They needed to learnChinese.

42[42] Fielde, Records Shanghai Conference 1877, pp. 156–158.43[43] Ibid.44[44] Anon., Conference on Missions held in Liverpool in 1860 (London: James Nesbit).45[45] A. H. Smith (1924) How Mission Looked When I Came to China, CR, 55 (February), p. 92.46[46] Fielde, Records Shanghai Conference 1877, pp. 156–158. She could well have been envisaging

not only mothers’ influence on children but the wider sharing of faith with relatives so charac-teristic of many Chinese, because of living in extended families or having one’s closestpersonal contacts with relatives.

47[47] Ibid., p. 156. (A modern reader may nevertheless find her tone uneasily dismissive.)48[48] Hoyt, ‘When a Field’, pp. 318–222.49[49] Beaver, American Protestant Women, p. 119.50[50] Quoted in Hoyt, ‘When a Field’, p. 334.51[51] Major source: A. Mildred Cable (1917) The Fulfilment of a Dream (London: Morgan & Scott),

other books compiled from quarterly letters by Cable and Francesca French; also numerousarticles in China’s Millions (CM—CIM monthly magazine). Francesca and Eva were sisters—the three women functioned as a mission trio.

52[52] Mildred Cable & Francesca French (1933) Something Happened (London: Hodder &Stoughton), pp. 39–54.

53[53] Ibid., p. 43.54[54] Marshal Broomhall (1901) Martyred Missionaries of the China Inland Mission (London: CIM),

p. 101ff. Eva contributed an account of the suffering and loyalty of the Christian Chinese,p. 270.

55[55] Cable, Fulfilment, pp. 69–74; CM (April 1905), p. 47, and (July 1907), pp. 111–112.56[56] Cable, Fulfilment, p. 159.57[57] CM (January 1916), pp. 5–8.

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Women’s History Review 541

58[58] CM (January 1920), pp. 77–78, and (September 1923), pp. 136–138.59[59] CR (February 1922), pp. 118–120.60[60] Kwok, Chinese Women, p. 73.61[61] For further details, see Phyllis Thompson (1982) Each to Her Post (London: Hodder &

Stoughton), pp. 83–102; Griffiths, Not Less, pp. 159–170; articles in CM.62[62] CM (December 1937), pp. 224–225.63[63] CM (July 1912), pp. 108–109.64[64] CM (September 1910), p. 133; Cable, Fulfilment, pp. 169–174.65[65] CM (November 1920), pp. 124–128.66[66] See also CM (September 1925), pp. 138–139, and (December 1937), pp. 224–225.67[67] Geraldine Howard Taylor (1934) Margaret King’s Vision (Philadelphia: CIM); Griffiths, Not

Less, pp. 170–184.68[68] Taylor, Margaret King, pp. 25–26.69[69] Ibid., pp. 27, 38, 49, 77.70[70] Ibid., pp. 50–51.71[71] Beaver, American Protestant Women, pp. 164–166.72[72] Originally The Bible Teachers’ Training School for Young Women. Taylor, Margaret King,

pp. 65–66.73[73] Kwok, Chinese Women, pp. 126–132.74[74] CM (February 1917), pp. 18–19.75[75] Susie Garland (1919) Promotion of Phonetic Writing in China, China Year Book, pp. 176–

183; Proceedings of 7th Annual Meeting of the China Council Continuation Committee (1919),pp. 9–10.

76[76] This section draws on Griffiths, Not Less, pp. 135–157, and CM articles such as Susie Garland,The Problem of China’s Illiteracy, CM (October 1923), pp. 154–156. I am not aware of anybook about Garland.

77[77] S. J. Garland, Home Study for Chinese Christians, CR (May 1925), pp. 319–321.78[78] Fielde, Records Shanghai Conference 1877.79[79] Myfanwy Wood, Women at the National Christian Conference, CR (March 1922), p. 195;

Kwok, Chinese Women, p. 90.80[80] M. C. White (1923) Evangelistic Work among Women, China Mission Year Book, pp. 146–193.81[81] Paul Estabrooks (1999) Bible Women of China (Tonbridge: Sovereign World).82[82] It may also reflect a lingering reluctance to apply the other words (‘pastor’, ‘elder’) to women,

or to women with humbler educational backgrounds.83[83] Tiangfen (April 2005).84[84] Kwok, Chinese Women, pp. 191–192.

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