Ch 3-3: Missionary Training for Women
Women’s missionary societies had their own training schools in North America. As early as 1901, the Women’s Board of Foreign Missions (WBFM, of the American Methodist Episcopal Church) opened a school for female missionaries. In 1901, the school had seven departments covering everything from moral philosophy to basic medicine to the conduct of meetings. Maria Gibson (1901, 168) explains the purpose of the school:
Life in the Training School dispels all visionary or romantic views of mission life. It also seeks to encourage the timid and to lessen self-conceit and self-seeking. Perfection cannot be attained in two years; but "self-knowledge," in a measure, is gained, "self-reverence" counseled, "self-control" required, and as the poet sings: "These three lead life to sovereign power."
The Training Schools were meant to provide practical skills as well as conceptual knowledge. In the Department of Religious Education at the Baptist Missionary Training School (BMTS), student activities included role play exercises in which classmates “impersonate children of specified ages,” and practicums in which students employ their pedagogical theory in practice at local Sunday schools, orphanages and other regional public institutions (Burr 1923, 377). The BMTS in Chicago held its 31st commencement in the spring of 1912, suggesting that its first class graduated in 1881 (Schyuler 1912, 620). By 1923, an advertisement in the Baptist periodical, Missions, shows that this school offered one, two and three year courses depending on one’s previous training.
For those young women who did not want to marry or who wanted some independence, some training at a “Normal School” would qualify them to teach in primary and secondary schools in small communities. Some of these teachers’ training schools were strongly oriented towards progressive and transnational education trends (Whitehead 2011). Anna Eriksson followed this path, graduating high school in Minnesota in 1893, then teaching school for two and a half years while taking teacher’s training during the summer. Finally, she entered the Baptist Missionary Training School (BMTS) in Chicago. She graduated in 1897, just in time to ship out for China, where she married Axel Salquist in Shanghai, taking their honeymoon up the Yangtze River.
Some young women seeking a career gravitated towards religious education. Since they were barred from seminaries, however, they attended deaconess training schools. In the American Methodist Church and the Canadian United Church women could neither become ordained ministers nor administer the sacraments and preach, but as trained deaconesses they could take on other pastoral work. The two-year curriculum in deaconess training schools such as the Epworth Evangelistic Institute in St. Louis included “biblical studies, church history, logic, doctrine, ethics, psychology, biography,… Christian education, [and] church government,” with special courses on women in the church and mandatory “practical work” in impoverished innercity neighborhoods (Pope-Levison 2018, 82, 85-87).
For other young women, a four-year university course in arts and sciences qualified them for teaching in local high schools. Home Economics was among the many supposedly feminine occupations that were in the process of “scientification” and professionalization at the turn of the twentieth century. After Emily Nystrom graduated from high school in the small town of South Omaha, Nebraska, she entered Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, where she received her AB degree in 1919. While her future husband Bill Gentry took graduate courses in medicine, Emily taught Home Economics in Newman Grove and Omaha, NB. Although missionary wives were not paid, mission societies sought married women with professional experiences and expertise. Emily’s teaching experience came in handy in Chongqing when she had to teach English to Chinese nurses and home school her own children (Gentry 1988, 1, 55).
Wealthier families might send their daughters to train as nurses in Toronto, as Annie Helen Male’s and Caroline Wellworth’s parents did. Nursing was one of the few occupations that could give women access to a world of travel without being a “wife of.” Many of the single women associated with missions in West China in the earliest days were medical workers, mainly nurses but with a few medical doctors like Retta Gifford or Anna Henry. Even women who never received nursing degrees often had some training in nursing. Martin Johns (1992, 1-2) described his mother’s path to missionary work: “Myrtle Madge went to normal school, taught at a rural school at Lumley [Ontario] and then became principal of a continuation school on Manitoulin Island [Ontario] before she committed herself to the Women's Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church to go to China.” Although her son does not mention it, Myrtle also gained some medical training at the University of Toronto, where a photograph documents her pulling teeth at the Dental School in 1910, the year before the Johns set sail for China.
Other female missionaries had training in educational fields, which they put to use in China. Beatrice Kitchen attained degrees from the Ontario College of Art and the Chicago Art Institute that prepared her for her work as illustrator for the West China Mission Press, run by her husband (Kilborn n/d). After Beatrice had lived in China for years, she adopted the local medium of wood block prints, often choosing scenes from the Sichuan countryside.
Esther Stockwell (1980, 40, 56, 66, 90) majored in piano and organ at Nebraska Wesleyan University and after graduation received her music teaching certificate from Oklahoma University. In China, she taught private music lessons to Chinese clients, music classes at the Canadian School in West China (CSWC), and helped with music programs in the CMM churches and led the Community Chorus at WCUU. Not all missionary wives specialized in the fine arts. With a Master’s degree in Education from Columbia University, Jane Balderston Dye became the head of the math department at the WCUU Normal School (Dyes n/d, 74).
Single women would obtain gender-specific training for the mission field through institutions such as the New York Training School for Deaconesses, the Mildmay Mission in London, the Ewart Training Home in Toronto, or St Colm’s College for Women in Edinburgh, many of which also prepared single women for work in the urban slums of their own countries. These institutions provided women with entry not only into a religious vocation but into a global community of single women, in which the demands of marriage and maternity were muted.