Lottie Moon-: Famous Single Woman Missionary: ‘Woman’s Work for Women’, or Proto-Feminist?

By Elizabeth Prata

God does a powerful and magnificent thing by raising up missionaries. He not only regenerates hearts but He establishes some to go to the hard places, live a hard life, and some even to die for His name. The selfish will of the natural man would never do that. The self-sacrificing heart of a regenerated Christian, would.

I think of many woman missionaries who lived and died for His Gospel. One of my favorites is Gladys Aylward, missionary to China. We remember the female missionaries of the 1800s and early 1900s who first went places, like Lottie Moon, Amy Carmichael, Annie Jenkins Sallee, Mary Slessor, and Isabel Crawford… among many others.

This week and last week I’ve presented essays about a few of these female missionaries, including Elisabeth Elliot, Amy Carmichael, and Gladys Aylward. These are ladies who seem to have done “missionary” right.

There are some women who have not behaved well on the mission field, or whose motives for going became obvious via their words or their letters.

We might be inclined to even think of them like super-Christians, given extra strength or morality or character, or who were extra spiritual. LOL, they were simply women, with the same sins, tendencies, and foibles as the rest of us.

In fact, you might be surprised to find that some female missionaries may have possessed extra doses of foibles and struggles as they considered the mission field. Some of them may have mixed their motives for going, struggling with the exact same issues we do today- feminism and being conflicted against prescribed gender roles.

After William Carey, missionary to India and considered the Father of Modern Missions, died in 1834, a fervor arose among the faithful. He had founded the Baptist Missionary Society, spent 41 years in India (without a furlough) and raised consciousness among Christians of the need for bringing the Gospel to the nations. Missions exploded.

In addition to the missions movement powerfully springing up in the mid 1800s, in which many Christians desired to go, another powerful movement sprang up too- First Wave Feminism. (1848-1920). Whereas previously, the only credible careers available to women were teaching or nursing, now, many women found that a missionary life afforded them a chance at a fulfilling career and even leadership opportunities on the foreign field that would not have happened back home. The Civil War had helped with that, either with women handling the homestead or the business while the men were gone, or serving in the army itself as doctors. Once bitten by the independence bug, many women found that missions offered similar opportunity to lead an independent life free from most of the societal restrictions that squelched their more forward ambitions.

In 1834, New York businessman’s wife, Sarah Doremus, heard a sermon about the need for women on the field in China, in order to reach Chinese women. She tried to get an organization going, but it went nowhere. By the time of the Civil War in 1861, there was less opposition to females singly joining men on the foreign mission field. Doremus’ organization was finally founded in 1861 with success: the Women’s Union Missionary Society (WUMS). It proposed to send out only single women, and indeed it became the first American organization to send single women to the foreign mission field. Early results were sending two medical missionaries, Dr. Sara Seward and Dr. Mary Seelye to India, who in 1871 established a children’s hospital in Calcutta.

Let’s look at one of the famous missions ladies.

Charlotte ‘Lottie’ Moon (1840-1912) Missionary to China.

One of the earliest and easily the most famous single female missionary, Lottie Moon, seems to have been a relentless advocate for expanded women’s roles, a proto-feminist.

Lottie was indifferent to the Baptist religion of her parents until age 18, when she experienced an awakening during a series of revivals. She then attended Virginia Female Seminary and Albemarle Female Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia graduating in 1861 with the first master of arts degrees awarded to a woman by a southern institution.

Lottie taught at home for a while, but then responded to a call from her sister Edmonia in 1871 who had already been approved for the China mission field and had been there a year. Lottie’s other sister Orianna had previously served in the Confederate Army as a Doctor in the US Civil War.

Foreign missions often encountered an issue of gender. In many nations, only women could reach women. Men counseling or giving the Gospel or interacting in general with women presented a scandalous problem. The teaching career having palled for Lottie, she responded to her sister’s call and went to China to “go out among the millions” as an evangelist. Instead she wound up in the same work-situation as she had been back home, teaching what she termed as “unstudious children” in China and feeling like an oppressed class of single women missionaries. She complained about this. A lot.

In an article titled “The Woman’s Question Again,” published in 1883, Lottie wrote:

Can we wonder at the mortal weariness and disgust, the sense of wasted powers and the conviction that her life is a failure, that comes over a woman when, instead of the ever broadening activities that she had planned, she finds herself tied down to the petty work of teaching a few girls?

Lottie had planned it all out, did she?

I know, O LORD, that a man’s way is not his own; no one who walks directs his own steps. (Jeremiah 10:23)

It is sad how Lottie viewed women missionaries teaching children on the mission field. It was “petty work” to her.

Lottie Moon was in fact ardent activist for women’s rights and a tireless supporter for an expanded sphere for women’s evangelistic work, despite what the Bible said women’s roles are to be. Her specific directive from the SBC Missions Board was to teach women, not to plant churches, evangelize, or teach men. Rebelling, Lottie did all three, loudly. She decided that to make a lasting impact she had to reach the men of the community. So she incited curiosity in showy ways, so that the curious men would attend her teaching meeting, and Lottie ‘innocently’ said that she was just mainly preaching to women but would not send the men away if they chose to come. That attitude was similar to Beth Moore’s stance a hundred years later,

Being a woman called to leadership within and simultaneously beyond those walls [of an SBC church] was complicated to say the least but I worked within the system. After all, I had no personal aspirations to preach nor was it my aim to teach men. If men showed up in my class, I did not throw them out. I taught. ~Beth Moore

Lottie wrote,

“Simple justice demands that women should have equal rights with men in mission meetings and in the conduct of their work.”

Lottie did receive criticism from both men and women for her opinions, one of which included women entering the missions field in order to do the “largest possible work,” but other women abhorred Lottie’s “disorderly walk” and one Mrs. Arthur Smith called for her to stop her “lawless prancing all over the mission lot.” Lottie didn’t.

Lottie: “What women want who come to China is free opportunity to do the largest possible work…. What women have a right to demand is perfect equality.” Mission Frontiers

She found it easier to advance her expanded view of female missionary work on the foreign field. When no men were available to preach, she did. Around 1885 Lottie decided on her own without permission from the home Board, to move to China’s interior, P’ingtu. Her heart was burdened for the many who were ‘groping ignorantly for God,’ and where incidentally there was also less Board oversight.

By 1886, Lottie had completely abandoned the “woman’s work for women” policy that had she had agreed to in order to receive her appointment as a Southern Baptist missionary to China. Her move to P’ingtu accomplished, she had no male protection, no male supervision, and evangelized as she saw fit, experimenting with various methods.

And of her Field Director’s attempts to redirect her efforts toward the call to which she agreed, teaching, she wrote-

“[His plans] would make him, through the Board, dictator not only for life but after he had passed from earthly existence. If that be freedom, give me slavery.”

Forgoing biblical submission, she threatened resignation. Lottie Moon was an egalitarian who did much to erode the SBC’s stance on complementarian roles for men and women. Her rebelliousness resonates to this day.

Lottie remained unmarried to her death. As regards her death, the common story is that Lottie gave away all her money and gave her food to starving Chinese during a famine, dying a board a ship at Kobe Harbor weighing 50 pounds. Other documents indicate Moon suffered from an infection located behind her ear, which the missions doctor theorized had invaded her spinal column and caused dementia. Part of Moon’s end-of-days dementia included fixations on lack of money and refusal to eat.

While some see Lottie Moon as a lover of the Gospel and a lover of souls, she was certainly a rebellious and relentless campaigner for ‘women’s rights’ within the SBC, spending many years fighting the SBC (once safely out on the field), rights that went far outside the bounds of biblical roles.

There were others also who wrestled with the biblical roles for women and found ‘independence’ and ‘freedom’ on the mission field, such as Mary Slessor (L)(Nigeria) and Annie Jenkins Sallee (R). (China).

As the missionary fever caught on the earnest people went out, many at risk to their lives or at the least, knowing they would never see near family again. There were others who were more led by personal passions than the glory of God. Some women went forth using Jesus as a vehicle to satisfy their aspirations, with a secondary consideration for His glory. No doubt many of these ladies did good. They healed, adjudicated, salved, built…but when unholy motivations factor in, the entire endeavor becomes tainted.

We praise God for the women and men missionaries who served well. As for the others, we leave it to Jesus to sort them out.