Embedded Files
Header Image: Letter to missionary Ida Pruitt from friends, discussing Pruitt's upcoming trip to China, 1972. (Radcliffe Collection)
Letter to missionary Ida Pruitt from friends, discussing Pruitt's upcoming trip to China, 1972. (Radcliffe Collection)
Missionary women were committed to memorializing each other. Many women missionaries kept exceptional records of their lives in diaries and letters. Missionary women also frequently wrote autobiographies of themselves and biographies of each other and recorded oral history interviews. How they told their own stories are perhaps the most revealing way to understand the motivations, methods, and impact of missionary women. This page contains many resources connected to memory-keeping
The letter to the left is written to missionary Ida Pruitt from friends, and reveals another important theme across the sources featured in this guide: friendship. Missionary women's ideas about race, gender, and religion were refracted through their relationships with other missionary women and memorialized in letters like these.
Secondary Sources
Secondary Sources
Books
Books
Christopher J. Anderson, The Centenary Celebration of American Methodist Missions: the 1919 World's Fair of Evangelical Americanism (2012).
Daniel H. Bays, The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History (2010).
Robert A. Bickers and Rosemary Seton (ed.), Missionary Encounters: Sources and Issues (1996).
Primary Sources
Primary Sources
Biographies: Written by and about women missionaries
Biographies: Written by and about women missionaries
W. P. Livingstone, Christina Forsyth of Fingoland: The Story of the Loneliest Woman in Africa (London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1918).
Charlotte Lewis Hoskins, Clara A. Swain, M. D., First Medical Missionary to the Women of the Orient (Boston: Woman's Foreign Missionary Society, Methodist Episcopal Church, ca. 1912).
Anna Magdalena Johannsen, Everlasting Pearl: One of China's Women (London: China Inland Mission, 1913).
Mary Culler White, Just Jennie: The Life Story of Virginia M. Atkinson (Atlanta: Tupper and Love, 1955).
Helen Barrett Montgomery, The Bible and Missions, ed. Sharyn Dowd (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009) This text was written by Montgomery in the early twentieth century, and assembled and published by Sharyn Dowd in 2009.
Ellen Ibernia Graham, Two Decades in the Hermit Kingdom, (unpublished, 1907).
Histories: Written by and about women missionaries
Histories: Written by and about women missionaries
Arthur Francis Tylee, The Challenge of Amazon's Indians: A Story of Missionary Adventure in South America Amongst the Nhambiquara Indians (Chicago: Moody Press, 1931).
Hellen Barrett Montgomery, Western Women in Eastern Lands: An Outline Study of Fifty Years of Woman's Work in Foreign Missions (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1910).
Sarah Estelle Haskin, Women and Missions in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, Tenn.: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1920).
Margarette Daniels, Makers of South America (New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1916).
Margaret Ernestine Burton, Women Workers of the Orient (New York: Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions, 1918).
Helen B. Hanson, From East to West: Women's Suffrage in Relation to Foreign Missions (London, 1911).
Estey, S. S., "In Memoriam: Mrs. Anna Adams Baird," 1916 sermon on the death of this woman missionary (Presbyterian Historical Society Collection)
We also learn about missionary women's memory-keeping strategies through sources like the one on the left: a 1916 eulogy for Mrs. Anna Adams Baird, a woman missionary to Korea.
Missionary women also told their stories to oral history interviewers--sometimes years or decades after returning to the United States. See below for an example of such an oral history interview, from the M. Madeleine Southard Collection at Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute.
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