In 1881, the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church published a collection of reports from or about female missionary doctors who had gone to work in the MEC’s “mission fields” in India and China.
Women’s auxiliary groups to mission societies were not unusual in the United States. Many missionary groups refused to admit women or required that they form their own society; they could be associated with but not on the same level as the main (male) group. Funds raised by women’s groups, however, were often put into the coffers of the main organization. In the case of this Women’s Foreign Missionary Society, the group seems to have had funds enough to support female doctors in several locations over the course of the nineteenth century. This book provides brief biographies and outlines of the work done by each.
Despite what appears to the modern reader to be the de-valuation of women’s work in the missionary societies themselves, “women’s work for women” was seen to be a vital part of missionary outreach in the field — where there were female-only spaces, for instance in Hindu or Muslim countries, male missionaries were debarred automatically. Supporting female missionary doctors, then, was a way to approach natives on multiple fronts at the same time: not only were the women able to supply medical attention to men and women, they could also evangelize at the same time. The idea was that the ‘softening’ effect of medical treatment would allow the missionary doctor an automatic point of entry for the Christian gospel.