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Mission work in Asia necessitated the presence of women missionaries to approach native women—foreign men simply had no access to the secluded females of those cultures. (This special need was the main reason the prohibition against single women entering the mission field had been relaxed during the nineteenth century.) Beaver, pp. 59-86. Because only women could teach other women and because the process of instruction took years due to illiteracy and lack of familiarity with Christianity, American women trained "Bible women" from among the natives to assist them. Often these women started teaching when they knew little beyond a simple catechism, but they handled rudimentary instruction and were particularly valuable in "itinerating" country work. Training and working with these women was also a function of a female missionary like Annie Jenkins Sallee, who used both older women from the industrial school and, eventually, more well trained young women who had been educated from childhood in mission schools as Bible women.
All teaching began at the most elementary level, whether done by missionaries or natives. Lessons in song were among the most attractive and best remembered. Two single women from Texas working in north China with Lottie Moon reported a typical journey in which they appealed to one
girl-wifewhose babies had died by telling her
that she might see her babies again(in heaven).
BS , March 21, 1912, p. 11.
Lessons were often drawn from something simple and at hand, as one of those women, Jewell Leggett, related:Once, while Miss Jeter was holding forth on idol worship, I plucked her sleeve and whispered, "You are leaning against a temple wall, and these people have never before had their gods attacked." For an answer she turned and drew on the wall the picture of a book, and said, "God has a book in which He has recorded the name of each of us. Every time we commit a sin He marks it down in this book, and at the judgment day He will judge us from it. And every time you bump your head to this idol He marks it down, for He says it is a sin to worship any god beside Him; there is no other." Ibid.
The curiosity aroused by women missionaries in China, particularly when they traveled, created situations in which they also had the opportunity to teach men. Lottie Moon, before the turn of the century, still suffered from biblical and southern prohibitions against her doing so, but she supplied a legalistic solution to the problem by having men sit "unofficially" behind her and listen while she taught women.
Una Roberts Lawrence,
Lottie Moon (Nashville: Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1927), pp. 141-142.
had been in China so long that she had forgotten all the handicaps that interpretations of scripture had thrown around the opportunities for women to teach the gospel, so she took the men in large classes.Ibid., p. 141. Although they did not solicit the attention of men, most women missionaries did teach men when the situation presented itself. More than in the United States or other western countries, women missionaries evangelized native Chinese men, obviously a function of the lack of workers, but also of the women's literacy and of the cultural differences—not just "difference," but superiority. The "otherness" of the Chinese, especially their lack of any knowledge of those things which the missionary deemed most important, provided a subconscious rationale for women to assume authority despite their sex. Within formal church structures, however, traditional ranking held constant: a native man, even one who was newly converted, took public roles in worship over any woman. Women did not hold formal preaching services nor administer the sacraments of baptism and communion, and they did not train preachers in the seminaries that formed.
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