“I Did Not Come to China for That!”: Intersections of Mission Work, Marriage, and Motherhood for Southern Baptist Women in China at the Turn of the 20th Century

Abstract

The private writings of two Southern Baptist women missionaries in China are analyzed to deepen our understanding of women’s perspectives on their daily lives. After reviewing secondary research on married and single women’s work in China, the author uses primary source examples from family letters and diaries to illustrate differences in responsibilities and opportunities for single and married women, and how motherhood changed their relationship to their work even further. Requirements for “homemaking”, and a “civilizing mission” expected of married women, increased pressure on missionary wives. Single women, arriving in larger numbers in the early 20th century, were able to focus only on the mission work and accomplish more. The success and productivity of single women further marginalized married women, particularly those with children, who could not keep up with their single counterparts in the mission work. By exploring these two exemplars we can draw an even more nuanced picture of the many ways Baptist women missionaries negotiated their callings in light of their family status.

1. Introduction

When 28-year-old Annie Jenkins arrived in China in 1905 she took her place among a large army of missionaries sent from America to win China for Christianity. In this period of rapid growth, the Christian missionary force of Americans had doubled in number since 1890. It would double again by 1919, reaching 3300 workers (Hunter 1984). Annie’s appointment came from the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, which had 88 workers spread across four missions in North, South, Central, and Interior China. Seventeen of these workers, like Annie, were single women (SBC 1905, pp. 126–27).

Soon after arriving in China, Annie experienced an emotional crisis when her American suitor proposed marriage to her. Eugene Sallee had been serving with the SBC in China and patiently waiting for Annie’s arrival. The marriage proposal sparked an argument. “I don’t want to marry. I told him I did not come to China for that”, she confided to her diary (Sallee 29 December 1905).

Annie’s purpose, what she had indeed come for, was to work with Chinese women and girls and share the gospel, using her experience as a school teacher. As we will see, her diaries explain her fears that marriage would impede this work. Her perceptions of the work accomplished by single (as compared to married) missionary women were most likely shaped before she left the United States. She had easy access to information about life on the mission field from women’s reports published in Baptist newspapers and missionary magazines. In addition, the Baptist Missionary Training School she attended in Chicago offered practical wisdom and contact with missionary visitors and guest speakers, both married and single, who were home on furlough or retired. With these influences and models, Annie made a firm decision not to marry for the first five years on the field and tried to refuse Eugene’s numerous proposals. She confided in her diary that she did indeed love Eugene; that was not the concern. The problem was, she believed, that a wife could not perform serious missionary work (Sallee 18 February and 17 June 1906).

Annie’s resistance to marrying the man she loved raises interesting questions about how her perceptions of marriage and mission work evolved. What messages did aspiring missionaries receive about marriage? Was Annie correct in her perception that marriage would diminish her role? And what about Anna Pruitt’s perceptions of her own household duties. Did she agree with others of her generation that managing a household was legitimate missionary work, even if younger single missionaries like Annie Jenkins, might not count domestic work as equivalent to other missionary duties?

To explore these questions, I will pause the narrative of the reluctant fiancé, Annie Jenkins, and provide some historical context on Southern Baptist women, marriage, and missionary life. Then, I will explore the experiences of two case studies: Southern Baptist missionary wife and mother, Anna Seward Pruitt; and Annie Jenkins Sallee. Anna Seward Pruitt arrived in China almost two decades earlier than Annie in 1887. She exemplified the typical married missionary mother raising her family in a mission compound and attempting to perform mission work in the margins. She was classified as an assistant missionary whose role was to provide an exemplary home life as a way of supporting her husband’s mission work and as a model home for Chinese women. Any mission work she could manage was volunteer and supplemental to her primary duties at home.

Anna Pruitt would have been acquainted with Annie Jenkins through Southern Baptist mission meetings and conferences in China. Customs of seniority would dictate that Anna would have been a model and mentor for Annie’s generation of young missionaries, perhaps leading to Annie’s impressions that there was not enough time to be married and “be in the work myself” as Annie expressed it. While each woman participated in a variety of evangelistic activities with Chinese women and girls, they both found their most fulfilling work to be teaching and administering schools.

A close examination of private diaries and letters provides a more intimate and detailed look at how these two Southern Baptist women viewed marriage and parenthood vis-a-vis their missionary work. These records often stand in contrast to women’s public writings for missionary magazines and annual reports. Women could confess their frustrations, anxieties, and struggles in private, while their publications remained positive and were focused on promoting support for the mission’s cause. To place these two women in context, I will provide a brief historical overview of Southern Baptist missionary women, married and single.

2. Married and Unmarried Women Missionaries

The marital status of a missionary, male or female, greatly affected the work. In her fascinating book about missionary families of the London Missionary Society (LMS), historian Emily Manktelow traces the earliest British patterns of the late eighteenth century, based on a model of “integration”. Single protestant men went from London to Africa or Asia planning to marry native converted women and raise bi-racial children within the mission. This early experiment did not turn out well because converts were few, cultural differences were complicated, and racial prejudices overpowered missionary zeal. To change course, the LMS sent four single white women in the first decade of the nineteenth century to join male missionaries and marry them. Thus began the British pattern, and the rationale, for sending white married couples abroad (Manktelow 2013).

American Protestant missionaries, including Southern Baptists, would follow this married missionary pattern as they entered China in the nineteenth century. The husband was appointed as the missionary and the wife sent to assist and take care of the family’s household and children. If she had time and energy, she worked with Chinese women and shared the gospel. Dana Robert, along with other mission historians, notes that the missionary wife provided stability for the male missionary as well as an important model for potential converts:

By the 1830s, the Christian home had become a justification for sending women missionaries, as a gender-based mission strategy, and was recognized as essential to the survival of the missionary family itself.

(Robert 2005, p. 328)

Southern Baptist missionary couples of the nineteenth century followed the usual pattern of a pre-embarkation wedding as outlined by Manktelow and Robert. Single male missionaries were rarely appointed by the Southern Baptist’s Foreign Mission Board (FMB). In fact, when C.W. Pruitt was approved in 1881 to sail to China, the FMB sent him extra money for passage, just in case he could secure a wife before departure (King 1985, p. 133).

Baptists had been sending missionaries to China since 1836, and when the Southern Baptists broke away from Northern Baptists in 1845, they formed the Foreign Mission Board to regulate and support missionary activities. After the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the China mission grew rapidly and by 1898 was able to sustain four missionary units: South China, Central China, North China, and Interior China. By 1910 there were 200 missionaries on the field (Li 1999).

Despite this tremendous investment of effort and resources, missionaries of this period found the Chinese mostly indifferent to their preaching and conversions were few.

This prompted a trend toward expansion into social services that might lead to conversions. Three types of work were primary: medical, educational, and evangelism. Historian Paul Varg points out that this trend shifted the focus from individuals to society; from “rescuing the heathens from eternal damnation” to introducing “a spirit of regeneration”, which could only be achieved as individuals become true believers of the gospel (Varg 1958, p. 71). This expansion of focus beyond the individual mirrored trends in the USA toward the Social Gospel and each denomination’s response was complex. Southern Baptists at home generally did not come out strong on the side of the Social Gospel, but in their mission efforts in China, they did make the shift to social services as a part of their focus, introducing schools and hospitals.1 Varg’s discussion of this transition in the China missions strategy centers on official documents from the male-led missionary enterprise but women’s writings add to the story. Helen Barrett Montgomery reports that in 1861 there was only one unmarried missionary anywhere on the field, but by 1909 there were 1948 unmarried American women on the mission field, in China and elsewhere (Montgomery 1910, p. 243). Dana Robert introduces an analysis of women’s work, which included schools for both boys and girls. Methodist women in China during this same period operated two hundred and thirty primary schools, nineteen high schools, and one college for women and girls. Robert notes that after India, China was the second major venue for “Woman’s Work for Woman”, a nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century missions philosophy based on the belief that “non-Christian religions trapped and degraded women, yet all women in the world were sisters and should support each other” (Robert 1997, p. 133). Southern Baptist women, like our two exemplars, often brought pre-missionary teaching experience from the US and school administration was a good fit for their skills. They worked diligently to create high-quality schools leading to literacy of church members and social improvement for the children of China.

The arrival of single women changed the role and influence of married women missionaries, as they took a back seat to the professionally trained single missionaries able to work full-time without family responsibilities. Emily Manktelow calls this trend the “demise” of the married woman missionary (Manktelow 2014). The two exemplars for this article, Anna Pruitt and Annie Jenkins Sallee, arrived in China 18 years apart and straddled this period of change. Their personal writings provide a more intimate look into how this broader inclusion of single women in the China mission may have affected each of them personally. As we have seen in the opening vignette, Annie Jenkins clung to her status as a single woman missionary because she perceived that a married woman could be sidelined in the work. To understand Annie Jenkins’s fears we begin by looking at the daily life of Anna Pruitt, one of the Southern Baptist women who would set the pattern for the missionary wife and mother almost two decades prior to Annie Jenkins’s arrival.

3. Anna Seward Pruitt: Homemaker in the Civilizing Mission

Anna Seward Pruitt exemplified the typical mother on the mission field raising her family in a missionary compound in Huang-hsien, the Pruitt’s assigned station in the Shandong region of North China. Anna birthed six children and three of them died. She juggled family and domestic responsibilities while still trying to perform mission work in a boys’ school and sometimes visiting local Chinese women to share the gospel.

Anna was born in 1862 into the Seward family who were Congregational and Presbyterian homesteaders in Tallmadge, Ohio. She was intelligent, committed to her schoolwork, active in her church, and close to her family (King 1985, p. 52). After graduating from Lake Erie Female Seminary and teaching school locally for two years, she traveled to California to teach at the invitation of a cousin. She had been teaching school in Los Angeles for four years when she received an invitation in 1886 from the Presbyterian women’s group in Philadelphia to be their missionary in China (King 1985, p. 56). Like other women missionaries, her thoughts about going overseas were contextualized by her marriage prospects. She writes, “When a mere child I used to think that if ever I were good enough and not within reach of an ideal husband, I would go as a missionary” (Seward 1938, p. 31). After initially declining the Presbyterian’s invitation, she wrestled with continued thoughts of the possibility and in May of 1877, she wrote. “The answer to my prayer for guidance has come through a change in my own heart. I now want to go to China” (Seward 1938, p. 33). After a brief trip back to Ohio to say goodbye to her family, she sailed in September of 1887.

Anna was just beginning her new life in Chefoo as a member of the Presbyterian mission when she met Cicero Washington (C.W.) Pruitt, a young Southern Baptist widower hailing from Georgia. Five years earlier, C.W. had begun his service in North China by marrying Ida Tiffany, another Presbyterian missionary who died of typhoid two years into their marriage (King 1985, p. 68). C.W. was quick to propose to the twenty-five-year-old Anna and, although she was new to China and had not known him long, she said yes. (King 1985, pp. 65–66). Protestant missionary agencies agreed that when a woman married on the field, she would automatically convert to the husband’s denomination and join his mission. After marrying outside the denomination, she was considered “lost” to the denomination that trained and commissioned her and paid her passage. Since Anna left the Presbyterians to marry only a few months after her arrival, the Presbyterians required the Southern Baptists to pay a fee to recover the funds they had invested in this “lost” missionary woman (King 1985, p. 68).

Anna’s initial intent as a single woman would have been to learn the Chinese language for two years before working alongside others to make home visits and convert Chinese women; however, her vision for her life changed drastically when she became a wife. The stresses of motherhood came quickly when she gave birth to two children in short succession: Ida, named after her husband’s first wife, and John, born 15 months later (King 1985, pp. 68–69). Meanwhile, the Pruitts moved to the district of Huang-hsien to open a new field of service. Consider the demands of Anna’s first three years in China: she married, left her Presbyterian mission station, converted to Southern Baptist, moved again with her young family to establish another station, and became a mother to two young children. Four more pregnancies would follow.

The move to Huang-hsien brought a very specific change to Anna’s responsibilities when the new mission acquired a magnificent compound of homes purchased from a prominent Chinese family. Anna proudly described her home in an 1891 letter:

We have one of the finest mansions in this village. It cost $60,000 when it was built some sixty years ago…It consists of six separate houses, one behind another, separated by pretty courts, and all enclosed within the same high wall, one of the houses is used for a chapel. Those occupied as living-rooms have been furnished with board floors and glass windows, so were you in our parlor you would not be reminded that we were not in some American parsonage….

(Pruitt 1891)

4. The Missionary Homemaker

Anna’s task would be to convert this Chinese building into an American-style home that would become a model of homemaking, hygiene, and childrearing. This important job was considered part of the missionary’s contribution to winning China for Christ. While homemaking as a missionary strategy has been well-documented in the literature on missionary women of this period, historian Jane Hunter develops the argument particularly for the context in China (Hunter 1984).

Homemaking served the mission by creating a comfortable environment to support the missionary husband but was carried one step further when Chinese wives and mothers were invited into the home to learn from the example set by the American missionary wife. This practice of using women’s homes as evangelistic tools developed in nineteenth-century missions and was codified in the twentieth century through missionary training brochures. One of the most popular set of instructions was “The Missionary Wife: Her Preparation, Place, and Program”. The Committee of Missionary Preparation invited Mrs. Charles Kirkland Roys to write this very practical instruction from her own experience as a Presbyterian missionary wife from 1904 to 1920 (Roys 1923). Roys was stationed in the same area of Shandong and it is likely she and Anna would have been acquainted. The duties and responsibilities of the missionary wife Roys described were brought to life in Anna Pruitt’s example.

Roys was clear that the primary role for married missionary women was to create a domestic oasis for their missionary husbands and children. If she had additional time, she should help her husband in his work and ease his burdens where possible. Roys suggested that if women did the bookkeeping for the household, wrote letters home to families and friends, and were willing to entertain their husbands’ colleagues and students, these would all be worthy and supportive acts of a helpmate (Roys 1923, p. 12).

These activities would certainly keep any woman very busy, but Roys and the culture of missions expected more, missionary mothers should engage in volunteer work outside the home too:

The wife’s activities are by no means limited to what can be done in the shelter of her home…For the missionary wife to have a definite and responsible connection with some form of organized missionary work outside the walls of her own home gives tone to her own Christian living and thinking, and should not be an undue tax on any normal woman. …As a responsible member of the mission, and not merely “her husband’s wife” each one can and generally does assume some part of the responsibility for station work.

(Roys 1923, p. 24)

Roys lists several possibilities for additional work, such as supervision of schools, evangelistic visitation, teaching English, or supervising industrial work with women. Each of these roles could be a full-time job in itself and such rigorous expectations cultivated a “superwoman” mentality, leading women like Anna Pruitt to overwork and exhaustion. Her letters home report many instances of illness and fatigue.2

Marjorie King, in her portrait of Anna Seward Pruitt, described the personal dilemma of missionary mothers attempting to carry out mission work, which brought the following:

…the constant juggling of family and missionary roles and the subordination of personal needs and desires to religious duties…If many missionary women fell short of the ideal by devoting most of their time and energy to their own families, many others, Anna among them, conscientiously tried to live up to the ideal of playing all of the familial and missionary roles well.

(King 2006, p. 25)

Anna believed God expected more of her, something beyond domestic work. In a letter to her friend Hattie written in 1895, she expressed the burden of her calling to do more:

I suppose there are some good women in America who envy the missionary her ability to hire cheap servants and have all her kitchen work done for her. If only those poor deluded women could know what a relief it would be to me if I could feel that all God expects of me was to tend to my own housework and care for my children.

(Pruitt 1894–1895)

Anna’s letters home indicate that she embraced the domestic role described by Roys but felt pressure to do “more” in line with what God (and perhaps others such as church supporters and her family) expected of her.

5. The Pruitt Children

Anna’s letters home to her family and friends show her delight in her children and the missionary mother typically was responsible for their education. The eldest two, Ida and John, were followed by Ashley (b. 1892), Virginia (b. 1896)—who only lived two months—Robert (b. 1897), and Mac (b. 1902). She recounts in private letters to the grandparents details of their games, what they were learning, and how they fit into the daily life of a missionary family. For example, in 1895, when another missionary gave the Pruitt children hand-me-down dolls, Ida and John (aged seven and six) made a hammock out of an old pillowcase for the dolls to sleep in. Anna reports with pride her daughter’s domestic skills: “Ida helped me to make underclothing and a dress for her brown haired Mary. She hemmed and gathered the skirt and sewed on seven buttons with praiseworthy patience” (Pruitt 1894–1895).

While managing a busy household and corresponding with her family and mission boards, Anna still attempted to perform at least some of the mission work she came to China to accomplish. From 1894, she added to her home responsibilities the management of a boys’ school (King 1985, p. 177). With such a large compound at their disposal, the Pruitts used one of the houses as a dormitory and could house the Christian headmaster, Mr. Tsang, as well (Pruitt 1978). Anna’s study of the Chinese language had been interrupted when she married CW, and her language skills were never as strong as her husband and children. As a missionary wife, Anna was not required to master the language but this handicap limited what she could teach at the school. She taught English and Math and hired Chinese teachers for other subjects.

The Pruitt compound included a church, which C.W. pastored. Chinese Christians dug a hole in the ground and filled it with water to serve as a baptistry for immersing new converts (Pruitt 1978, p. 36). To manage such a busy hub of activity, Anna relied on the help of a few Chinese servants, which was typical for missionary families. The Pruitts hired a Chinese family to live within the compound and serve. The Chinese mother was the “amah” who cared for the children, the father was the cook, and their son was the gatekeeper who ran errands and controlled traffic into and out of the compound (Pruitt 1978, pp. 69, 83).

Sundays were one of the busiest days for Anna, despite being designated a “Sabbath”. She listed her activities in a letter home:

On Sunday I sing with the school boys for an hour and a half before church time, then after dinner is S.S. [Sunday School], and after that my exercise if I take any, also my time for teaching my own children their Bible lessons. After supper I have another hour with the school boys. Tonight we studied God’s commands about Sabbath keeping. A Holy Sabbath is not easily conceived by either our adult Christians and our boys find it very hard not to play or romp.

(Pruitt 1894–1895)

In 1897, the Pruitts suffered a terrible loss when their five-year-old son Ashley died of typhoid. Anna was depressed for months and could barely make it through a day of responsibilities. Her letters express a lack of motivation to perform the work, guilt over what she may have done differently during his illness, and anxiety about the health of her four remaining children (King 1985, pp. 208–9). Illness and death of children was a common fact of life for missionary mothers. The Pruitts would lose one more of their six children. John survived a serious childhood illness in China but then died of typhoid at age 20 when he and his older sister Ida were traveling in the United States (King 1985, pp. 26, 40). Death of loved ones was a facet of missionary life.

In addition to illness, missionary mothers like Anna experienced other threats to the family’s safety. Violence was also a cause of death for missionaries, and Shandong, the province where the Pruitts lived, was the birthplace of the Boxer Uprising. This was a populist anti-Western movement brewing throughout the 1890s and culminating in the murder of 200 missionaries and about 30,000 Chinese Christian converts in the year 1900 (King 2006, pp. 31–32). At the first warnings for the missionaries to evacuate the area, the Pruitts refused to leave their station, but at the crisis point, Anna quickly prepared for the household to move to Chefoo, a safer port city. C.W. arranged for the two oldest children, who were away at boarding school, to be brought by mule-cart to meet the family. In a dramatic story of escape, C.W., pedaling as fast as he could on his bicycle, escaped a stone-throwing Boxer, and arrived safely to meet the family in Chefoo. Other children were not as fortunate as the Pruitts. Ida remembered her little classmates at the school for missionary children being called one by one out of the classroom to be told of their parents’ deaths. Family life in China could be heartbreaking for parents and children alike (Pruitt 1978, pp. 31–32).

It is not hard to imagine that Anna Pruitt was overworked and exhausted trying to meet the demands of her life as a missionary wife. She juggled the work of maintaining an orderly American-like mission compound as a model for Chinese women while also taking on the full-time job of operating a boys’ boarding school. Even with this overwhelming daily work, Southern Baptists classified Anna Pruitt as an assistant missionary and she earned no salary of her own.

For years to come, the Pruitts would serve as models for a younger generation of Southern Baptist missionaries arriving in China, including Annie Jenkins and her husband-to-be, Eugene Sallee. Perhaps Annie Jenkins’s fear of not learning the language, or not having time for mission work could be traced to stories she knew about Anna Pruitt and other women who were single on arrival, married right away, and found it difficult to carry out the mission work they had envisioned for themselves while still fulfilling expectations for wives and mothers. As Manktelow (2014) argues, the demise of the missionary wife had begun with the arrival of single professionally trained women. Single women could draw a salary and carry the missionary title, status markers that would marginalize further the work of women like Anna Pruitt.

6. Reluctant Fiancé, Annie Jenkins, Becomes a Wife

As changes to mission strategies in China brought new possibilities, women like Annie Jenkins, appointed in 1905, found new opportunities among Southern Baptists. Single missionary Charlotte “Lottie” Moon had been one single missionary in the latter part of the nineteenth century who demonstrated what unmarried Southern Baptist women could accomplish. Moon began her service in 1873 but was different from the typical Southern Baptist missionary woman. She was independently wealthy, well-educated, and well-supported by Southern Baptists due to her success at winning Chinese converts. Yet most single women did not bring the wealth, connections, and leadership experience Moon had at her disposal. They would need training and preparation to follow in her footsteps.3

Jane Hunter describes the proliferation of single women missionaries in early twentieth-century China and outlines a few practical reasons for how single women were an asset to the China mission enterprise. First, without a husband or children to tend to, this high-energy missionary had more time, more freedom to travel, and could spend her time fully devoted to the mission’s cause. Second, housing her was efficient. Rather than building or buying a family home for her, as would be provided for a male missionary, the single woman was placed within a missionary family or grouped together with other single women in “ladies houses”. The single woman would have been a bargain for mission boards since she could be paid less than the male missionary who was obligated to support his family. Hunter also notes that without children, medical expenses for a single woman would be lower and, with no one waiting for her at home, she could be sent to remote areas for days at a time (Hunter 1984, p. 63).

With all of these advantages, the single woman still carried a few disadvantages in the eyes of mission boards. There would be a chance, as in the case of Anna Seward, that the single woman would marry into another mission and be lost to the Southern Baptists. In addition, women were not ordained in Southern Baptist life and therefore could not baptize new converts. In Southern Baptist culture, women were forbidden to preach. Finally, most single women of this era lacked the theological training male missionaries received in seminary. As a China missionary, Rev. E.Z. Simmons expressed it in 1900, “When they come to China, they readily learn the language but they do not know how to teach the Bible for they do not know it themselves” (Simmons and Mullins 1900).

Annie Jenkins was the kind of exceptional woman who embodied the advantages of a single woman candidate, and unlike the women in Rev. Simmons’s complaint, she had a thorough knowledge of the Bible and some theological training. She was born in 1877 as the third of nine children descended from an influential Southern Baptist family in Waco, Texas. Her father, Judge W.H. Jenkins, was a lay leader in Waco’s First Baptist Church while her mother played the organ and was involved in women’s organizations of the church. Annie also played the organ, visited the sick, and taught Sunday School (Sallee 1952; Hattox 1977, p. 34).

Annie fit the requirements for being a “professionally trained” missionary and her educational record far exceeded what was typical for Southern Baptist women. She graduated with honors from Baylor University in 1897 and became the first woman to receive a Master’s degree from Baylor in 1899. She was still uncertain whether she would go overseas, but in 1902, after a few years of teaching, she went to Chicago to study at the Baptist Women’s Missionary Training School among Northern Baptists, since there was no Southern Baptist training school for women at that time (Singleton 1968). Annie became more visible among Southern Baptist women when she described her Chicago experiences in an article published by The Baptist Argus. She extended a plea in her editorial for Southern Baptists to establish their own missionary training school for women (Jenkins 1904). The Southern Baptist’s Woman’s Missionary Union would do so in 1907 in Louisville, Kentucky, and women who followed Annie to China could take advantage of its program.

With two degrees from Baylor University, a missionary training school certificate, and an evident missionary zeal, Annie Jenkins became a prized asset among Texas Baptists. She joined the Baptist Young People’s Union (BYPU), an organization for faith formation of young men and women, and emerged as a leader wherever she was involved. At a BYPU meeting in 1903, when she was on break from the training school, she made her final decision to become a missionary. At the same meeting she met Eugene Sallee, the brother of her training school friend, Mamie Sallee (Hattox 1977).

When she returned from the training school in Chicago, Texas Baptists engaged Annie in fundraising for missions while she was applying to become a missionary to China. Annie was such an accomplished fundraiser that the Texas Baptists, represented by J.B. Gambrell, wrote to the Foreign Mission Board asking if it would delay her appointment until Spring so she could raise more money for Texas Baptist women before departing. Appealing to the financial need of the board, J.B. Gambrell argued the following:

I believe it would be worth thousands of dollars to missions and not a few missionaries for the foreign field. She gets a tremendous grip in people’s hearts and inspires them with holy zeal…Personally, I regret to lose this force just now. Miss Annie appeals mightily to the young people.4

Eugene was not Annie’s first suitor, in fact, her college diaries reveal that she had other courtships and opportunities to marry,5 and while she would allow men to accompany her to prayer meetings, she turned down any proposals of marriage. (Sallee Diary, 23 February 1897 and 3 January 1899). With Eugene, however, hers was not a final refusal, but a request for him to wait while she established herself as a contributing missionary and then in time she would consider marriage (Sallee Diary, 29 December 1905). Eugene was persistent and continued bringing up his proposal while Annie clearly stated in her diary why she was not ready to marry:

I had decided on so much work I was going to do. I feel a single woman can do so much more work than a married one with house-hold cares. I feel I could have more influence with the young unmarried. I never did feel called upon to keep house for a man. I want to be in the work myself.

(Sallee, 31 December 1905)

Opposed to giving up her own mission work, Annie fought the expectations of the two most important men in her life: her father and her suitor. Even though Annie had experienced her own successes as a highly educated woman and a rising leader among Texas Baptist women, her father’s voice was ever-present in her mind.

…it is hard for me to give up my plans and just be willing to live over here and not do anything of the actual work, but just help him to do it. I have planned such big things and had such high ambitions for myself as a single woman that I can’t give them all up just now. I know what Papa says “a woman’s highest possible attainment in this world is to be a wife, and mother”, but oh! me I have seen another side…and I find when I think of merging my own self-identity and all, literally losing sight of self and all for him, it[’s] hard. He said I might help to make something of him. I don’t know how it will all end. I hate to let him know I feel as I do, but I have nobody to talk to and so I tell him.

(Sallee, 6 January 1906)

Annie’s words reflect the fear of what she would have to sacrifice as her own missionary identity faded away and she became an assistant to her husband’s work. Although Eugene and Annie had been writing letters since Eugene sailed to China two years earlier, Annie believed they had an understanding that she would take time to perform her missionary work a few years (she suggested five years) as a single woman before considering marriage.

Eugene Sallee would not take no for an answer and continued bringing up the proposal each time they visited each other. In spite of her reluctance, unexpected circumstances caused Annie to change her mind and marry within a few months of his first proposal. When Eugene became seriously ill with dysentery the doctor ordered him to travel to Japan and spend some months in recovery. He did not want to leave without Annie, and she agreed to marry him and assist with his recovery. The couple married in Shanghai on 18 September 1906 and sailed for Japan where she continued language study at home while Eugene recovered (Hattox 1977, p. 42).

7. Change of Heart

Within six months of the wedding, Annie’s diaries indicate she was enjoying married life and growing accustomed to her new role as a wife. The couple returned to Chengchow where Annie taught in a mission school. On their six-month anniversary, she declared. “I am very thankful I am married and that God has given me a husband who loves me so tenderly as Mr. S. loves me” (Sallee 18 March 1906). Reflecting on her first few months of marriage, she admitted that marriage may in some ways be helpful to her work and she perceived that Eugene supported her efforts to start a boarding school. She wrestled with how to combine God’s calling, the work she loves (teaching), her efforts to start a school, and her love for Eugene.

I can’t think that being married must keep me from the work I love best of all on earth! I think more cares are taken from me in many respects and I am the more able to serve…I believe I love Mr. Sallee as well almost as it is possible to love any one, yet I find a growing longing to be more and more like Christ and more fully to give myself to His service and I’m sure Mr. S. is glad for everything I can do and wants me to give myself as far as my strength allows. I just believe there will be a way for a boarding school here. If I’m not the one, oh! God show me what the better work is that thou hast in store for me and help me to wait on thee.

(Sallee 28 November 1906)

Would marriage lead to motherhood? In an era without modern birth control, it was likely. As a new bride, Annie worried about getting pregnant too soon, perceiving that the timing of conception would be up to God. She nearly panicked when she thought she might be pregnant within the first year of marriage, writing “I want to get the language first and get the school started, oh, if the Lord will just let me!!” (Sallee 17 October 1906). Annie had witnessed the experiences of an earlier generation of Southern Baptist missionary wives and she understood that having children would further diminish her time for mission work.

In 1908, Annie and Eugene Sallee moved from Chengchow to Kaifeng, capital city of the Honan province. They were the first SBC missionaries to open this area for the Southern Baptist Interior China Mission. Here the couple would settle in and conduct their mission work together for over two decades. Eugene opened a boarding school for boys, which grew into a junior college to train ministers, Kaifeng Baptist College (Ray 1924, p. 11). Annie was finally able to open her own school for girls, which she had been longing to do. In spite of her fears that marriage would keep her from meaningful work, she ran an ambitious educational program and settled into life as a missionary.

Annie’s prediction that her work would be limited by marriage proved to be only partially correct. Unlike Anna Pruitt and most other missionary wives, Annie never bore any children. As a wife, but not a mother, Annie Jenkins found more time and opportunity than most missionary wives to invest in her work. She still had to endure the insult of the label of “missionary assistant”, although the records listed the single woman working under her supervision with a more prestigious title of “Teacher, Evangelist” (Lackey 1921, p. 85).

8. The Mission Work Develops

Annie Jenkins’s school work developed at a time of transition in the China mission practices, when schools and colleges became a focus of missionary energy. When Annie arrived in 1905, China already had a well-established network of mission schools serving girls and young women. Initial education typically took place at local village primary schools, and from there, students would progress to “middle” or boarding schools located at the mission stations (Hunter 1984, p. 16). Graduates of middle schools could go further and proceed to women’s colleges. The curriculum at the mission schools often included the Confucian “three character classic”, parts of the Bible, catechism, arithmetic, and geography (Graham 1995). Some of the students took courses in music, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and other sciences. As part of the missionary goals of cultivating a Christian home, girls were trained in cooking and dressmaking (Burton 1911).

When she first attempted to open her new school, recruitment started slowly. Annie hired a Chinese Bible woman, Mrs. Chen, to serve as a liaison to the community and vouch for the new mission school. The two women worked to increase enrollment and by 1911 the school had 18 boarding students (Sallee 18 May 1911). Annie also started a day school for younger girls within the mission compound to serve as a feeder for the boarding school. When she sent letters and stories home to Texas asking missionary groups to financially sponsor the new school, her many contacts in Texas provided the financial support she needed to build a new building. The women asked for the school to be named the Annie Jenkins Sallee Girls School (SBC 1914, p. 226).

In 1911, the Sallees went back to the USA for furlough and left other missionaries in charge of their school and church work. While they were away, the Revolution of 1911 broke out in China and they came back to find their schools empty and they had to move to a new home, two miles away. It took several months to re-open the schools, but Southern Baptists sent a helper, Loy Savage, a single woman who was completing her language study. Loy lived in residence at the boarding school and helped teach classes. In spite of setbacks from the Revolution, Annie’s two schools were thriving again by 1914 (SBC 1914, p. 226).

Perhaps Annie was surprised when, as a married woman, she was able to perform her mission work successfully and experience the joy of service. She declared publicly in her report to the SBC that 1914 was the “happiest year’s work of my life in China”, as the 23 girls in her school helped her to see “in a larger way than ever before the hopes of seven long years being realized” (SBC 1914, p. 226).

Later that year, Annie launched a new and innovative work in Kaifeng: an industrial school for middle-aged and older women. Here, the focus was on practical skills rather than book learning. The women were taught sewing, embroidery, and other crafts. They were paid a salary of USD 0.12 per day to attend and produce goods, thereby earning their own money. The women, mostly illiterate, were required to attend a one-hour Bible study each day where they memorized verses (SBC 1915, p. 192). Similar to the micro-business techniques of today’s global co-ops, Annie sold baby garments, napkins, linens, and other handmade goods that students had made to buyers in the US and China (Singleton 1968). This allowed her school to become self-supporting without dependence on funds from the Foreign Mission Board.

Annie Jenkins Sallee continued to serve in China, even after Eugene’s death in 1931, which occurred when the couple was home on furlough. Returning to China as a widow, Annie finally received her own salary and missionary title, which she had given up when she married. She enjoyed a decade of freedom to devote herself solely to the mission cause. This last ten years in China she lived out the single life in Kaifeng that she had imagined when she first appeared in China 25 years earlier.

In 1941, at the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Annie and her cousin, Josephine Ward, were arrested in Kaifeng and imprisoned for 8 months by Japanese soldiers. After her release, she retired to the USA in 1942 where she wrote books about China missions and raised money for student scholarships. Annie Jenkins Sallee lived to be 90 years old and was buried in 1967 in her hometown of Waco, Texas (Singleton 1968).

9. Conclusions: Marriage, Motherhood, and Personal Negotiations of Missionary Women

The personal writings of Anna Seward Pruitt and Annie Jenkins Sallee provide insight into the ways individual women experienced changing trends in the marital status of women missionaries. Both women responded to their own personal callings to share the gospel message in China, outside the callings of their husbands. Both women aimed to bring their gifts and experiences as school teachers to Chinese children. Both arrived in China as single women and married within their first year of service.

Anna Seward Pruitt, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, followed the typical model of missionary marriage and motherhood. She did her best to negotiate the roles of wife and mother and at the same time maintain at least some of the work she had planned. As we have seen, she found ways to integrate work and home life by housing her school within the family’s mission compound and by inviting her daughter to serve as an assistant teacher to the Chinese children. She also made contributions from her desk at home, writing prolifically for the Baptist women’s presses. Anna experienced seasons of grieving for the deaths of three children along with exhaustion, illness, and depression. Despite the trials recorded in her diary, her public writings in missionary magazines, newspapers, and books express her zeal for winning converts, her love for her school children, and her dedication to the mission cause.

Annie Jenkins Sallee exemplified the well-prepared professional missionary, arriving single and with a graduate degree from a premier Baptist university, two years of further education in a missionary training school, and experience in teaching and fundraising. She came to China with great enthusiasm to use her stellar education and many skills and was met by an impatient suitor, eager to marry her. She initially planned not to marry for five years so that she could have time to first establish herself in the work. “I have planned such big things and had such high ambitions for myself as a single woman that I can’t give them all up just now”, she declared (Sallee 6 January 1906). She finally gave in to her impatient and persistent fiancé and married within her first year. As we have seen, her fears that she would not be able to perform her own mission work decreased as she proved to herself and others that she could accomplish much of what she planned. She never became a mother, and we do not know if this fact pleased or troubled her. Compared to mothers on the mission field, however, Annie had more time to devote to mission work. By 1914, as she was about to launch a new and innovative project of an industrial school, she wrote about her successes in the SBC Annual’s public record and declared this, her eighth year in China, her happiest year. Her long years of service and her return to China after Eugene’s death are evidence that she found a fulfilling life of service, in spite of her initial worries about married life.

As scholars Manktelow, Robert, and Hunter explain, the model of the white missionary couple became normative for nineteenth-century missions in China and elsewhere. As more single women were sent overseas, new models emerged in the form of a professionally trained single woman who could focus exclusively on mission work without the responsibilities and demands of home life (Manktelow 2014; Robert 1997). With the proliferation of single women missionaries, women like Annie Jenkins had new opportunities for teaching, nursing, and other kinds of work for women. In Annie’s case, she resisted marriage for fear that marriage (and the children that might result) would limit her ability to make her own contribution. She did not want to work in her husband’s shadow and, as she put it, “give up my plans and just be willing to live over here and not do anything of the actual work, but just help him to do it” (Sallee 6 January 1906). Advice for married missionary women—passed down informally but also published by authors like Mrs. Roys—clarified the high expectations. The primary expectation for a married missionary woman was to create a domestic oasis for her husband and children. If a woman had time left over, she should help her husband in his work, or perhaps volunteer in mission work herself (Roys 1923). Southern Baptists’ use of the title “assistant missionary” assigned to women like our two exemplars underscored that expectation.

The private writings of these two missionaries deepen our understanding of women’s perspectives on their daily lives as they managed their family responsibilities with their own mission work. Private writings of never-married, divorced (rare), and widowed women missionaries could provide more models to consider in further research. As scholars are able to uncover more letters and diaries through family bequests and digitization of materials, we will be able to draw an even more nuanced picture of the many ways women missionaries negotiated their callings in light of their family status.