The stereotype of the woman missionary has ranged from that of the
longsuffering wife, characterized by the epitaph "Died, given over
to hospitality", to that of the spinster in her unstylish dress and
wire-rimmed glasses, alone somewhere for thirty years teaching
heathen children. Like all caricatures, those of the exhausted wife
and frustrated old maid carry some truth: the underlying message of
the sterotypes is that missionary women were perceived as marginal
to the central tasks of mission. Rather than being remembered for
preaching the gospel, the quintessential male task, missionary
women were noted for meeting human needs and helping others,
sacrificing themselves without plan or reason, all for the sake of
bringing the world to Jesus Christ.
Historical evidence, however, gives lie to the truism that women
missionaries were and are doers but not thinkers, reactive
secondary figures rather than proactive primary ones. The first
American women to serve as foreign missionaries in 1812 were among
the best-educated women of their time. Although barred from
obtaining the college education or ministerial credentials of their
husbands, the early missionary wives had read their Jonathan
Edwards and Samuel Hopkins. Not only did they go abroad with
particular theologies to share, but their identities as women
caused them to develop gender-based mission theories. Early
nineteenth-century women seldom wrote theologies of mission, but
they wrote letters and kept journals that reveal a thought world
and set of assumptions about women's roles in the missionary task.
The activities of missionary wives were not random: they were part
of a mission strategy that gave women a particular role inthe
advancement of the reign of God.
By moving from mission field to mission field in chronological
order of missionary presence, Robert charts missiological
developments as they took place in dialogue with the urgent context
of the day. Each case study marks the beginning of the mission
theory. Baptist women in Burma, for example, are only considered in
their first decades there and are not traced into the present.
Robert believes that at this early stage of research into women's
mission theory, integrity and analysis lies more in a succession of
contextualized case studies than in gross generalizations.
General
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