Not until 1918 (the end of the period upon which this site focuses) did Southern Baptist women gain the right to act as voting representatives at Convention meetings. Before this date they could neither attend the Convention nor serve as leaders on the Convention's Boards (Foreign Missions, Home Missions, Sunday School). The official history of the Southern Baptist Convention in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, therefore, largely focuses on the work of male ministers and male Convention leaders.

       But the majority of the laity in the local churches were women. And in the late nineteenth century, well before they could vote in Convention meetings or serve as members on the Convention's Boards, middle-class Southern Baptist women, like their counterparts nationally, began organizing societies for the purpose of supporting foreign missions.

The Appeal of Foreign Missions

       The interdenominational women's foreign mission movement, according to historian Patricia Hill, was the largest of the great women's movements of the nineteenth century, eclipsing the more famous temperance movement and women's rights movement.

       Hill argues that while the explosion of foreign mission work among evangelical protestants around the turn of the twentieth century is usually attributed to America's growing imperialism at this time, the women's foreign mission movement is at least as important an explanation for protestant churches' forays into foreign missions.

       Why did foreign mission work appeal to middle-class Victorian women? The reasons must have been various and complex for the individual women involved, but it seems fair to say that foreign mission work offered women new opportunities that did not initially challenge their strictly prescribed social roles. The movement offered women an experience of vicarious adventure (through prayer for and correspondence with foreign missionaries) as well as a social outlet (attending auxiliary meetings) that did not compromise their status as "true women." The Victorian ideal of woman as pious, pure, and domestic need not conflict with the middle- class women's mission activities if the ideology of foreign missions prioritized pious self-sacrifice and domesticity. Patricia Hill argues that women were, in fact, given special status within the movement:

       In 1913, on the 25th anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention's Women's Missionary Union (WMU), first president of the WMU Fannie E. Heck wrote a celebratory history of its first twenty-five years. Heck characterizes the early rumblings of the women's foreign mission movement in terms that clearly support Hill's argument about women's special mission to "heathen" mothers:

       For Victorian women, the ideology of foreign missions emphasized the ultimate importance of their social role. But women entered the foreign missions movement as missionaries or as home front auxiliary members not just out of a sense of duty, but because foreign missions carried the appeal of adventure and romance, an opportunity for a vicarious (or real) experience that also explains the attraction of the nineteenth century's sentimental fiction. Middle class women in the late nineteenth century not only participated in significant numbers in foreign missions causes but also made up the primary readership of the popular sentimental novel. The vicarious adventure offered the reader of sentimental fiction was also available to the woman on the home front of the foreign mission movement. The fact that both activities gripped the imaginations of Victorian women is evidenced by the close resemblance between sentimental fiction and mission lore. WMU leader Fannie Heck relates the sentimental tragedy of the daughter of a frontier missionary who dies of privation and disappointment when her family doesn't receive the promised care package (called a mission box) from the "city church in the East." ⁶ Alternatively, when the children of missionaries do receive the much anticipated mission box, the results are marvelous, as in Heck's story of the "pine pandora box of fate [that] made a missionary":

       Women's mission societies first began forming in local Southern Baptist churches around the middle of the nineteenth century, primarily in more urban areas like Baltimore (which would eventually be the first headquarters of the Woman's Missionary Union). By the 1870s, as Reconstruction drew to a close and the Southern Baptist Convention was renewing and expanding its work, so too did Southern Baptist women in Baltimore and the Upper South begin attempts to organize Southern women for the missions cause. Their methods included sending circulars throughout the South encouraging Baptist women to collect money for domestic and foreign missions by placing mite boxes in their homes. The fundraising efforts of Southern Baptist women attracted the attention of the Convention's male leadership, whose domestic and foreign mission work increasingly benefitted from the donations of the churchwomen. According to Southern Baptist historian W.W. Barnes, "The Foreign Mission Board, recognizing the possibilities in the new movement, agreed to supply the mite boxes." ⁸ During its 1875 meeting, the Convention officially commended the fund-raising efforts of "these gentle and loving servants of Jesus":

       Beginning in the 1870s and growing stronger throughout the 1880s were calls for Southern Baptist women to organize beyond the local church level. Various administrative structures were suggested, including state central committees and a female superintendent of women's work. The Baltimore women who circularized the South with calls for women to give their mites for missions also advocated organizing Southern Baptist women into local societies and state committees for the purpose of greater efficiency. By the early 1880s the wives who traveled with their husbands to the Convention meetings (always in a different Southern city) began assembling to pray, socialize, and discuss women's work while their husbands attended the Convention across town.

       Calls for a women's organization came not only from women. Male leaders of the Convention who were arguing for stronger denominationalism at this time saw in the women's work great potential for strengthening the Convention. The work of the women would have been difficult for the male leadership to ignore if Fannie Heck is correct in stating that as of 1885 (while women were not organized beyond the local church level), "women were giving one-third of all given to foreign missions." ¹⁰ (Given the fact that representation to the Convention was determined by financial contributions, the meetings would certainly have looked different if women were allowed representation at this time.) Historian Patricia Hill, in her study of the women's foreign mission movement nationally, reports similar figures:

       But many, perhaps most, Southern Baptist men who attended the Convention's meetings in the 1870s and 1880s saw in the women's work more threat than promise, particularly if women were to organize South-wide. The determined debate that ensued indicates a general awareness among Southern Baptist men of the growing strength of the women's mission movement in Southern Baptist churches. W.W. Barnes narrates the debate that occurred on the floor of the 1884 Convention over whether to appoint a female superintendent of women's work:

       Richmond's more progressive Baptist newspaper, The Religious Herald, reported on the 1884 meeting's events:

       Throughout the 1880s and 1890s conflict abounded among Southern Baptists -- on the Convention floor, in state convention meetings, in churches, and in the religious press -- between the progressives who wanted a centralized regional denomination and the conservatives who wanted Southern Baptist power to remain in the hands of local churches and state conventions. This conflict had a social element as well: the progressives embraced an expansion of women's work for the purposes of a stronger denomination, while the conservatives both opposed a stronger denomination and saw in women's work the potential for "things unwomanly," notably public speaking before "mixed assemblies." Fannie Heck, who was active in women's mission work in North Carolina in the 1880s and who became the WMU's first president, looked back on the 1880s controversy in 1913:

       In their 1885 meeting, the men of the Convention temporarily settled the question of a women's organization with the decision that each state convention would appoint a central committee (of women) to oversee the women's work in that state. States that opposed a woman's organization, as in the case of Virginia, simply didn't appoint a committee. But most of the Southern states did appoint women's committees, and the work of organizing Southern Baptist women for the cause of missions began immediately:

       The women's meeting of 1887, held in conjunction with the Convention meeting in Louisville, revisited the issue of creating a Convention-wide central committee of women for the purpose of greater and more efficient work for missions. They decided that an official vote on the question would take place the following year, 1888. The women advocating a central committee, who certainly did not align themselves with the women's rights movement and who wanted to assure the men of the Convention that organizing a central committee of woman's work would not threaten men's power, issued the following statement from their 1887 meeting:

       When the women met the following year in Richmond, again in conjunction with the men's Convention meeting, they voted to organize a central committee, the name of which in 1890 became the "Woman's Missionary Union (WMU), Auxiliary to the Southern Baptist Convention." The preamble to their Constitution, submitted to an anxious men's meeting a few blocks away, read as follows:

       The story of the events of 1888, in which the women met in one Richmond church while the men nervously awaited their decision in another church a few blocks away, has become the stuff of Southern Baptist lore, told and retold in personal accounts and church histories. Each time it is told, the story subtly pokes fun at the "benighted husbands" who recognized enough potential power in their women that they could even speculate on a female takeover of the Convention itself:

       Rather than forming an organization separate from their male-led denomination, as the women of most missionary societies in other parts of the country had done, Southern Baptist women made the more conservative decision that the WMU would function as an auxiliary to the already established state conventions and denominational Boards. The nervous men at the Richmond Convention in 1888 were correct in their estimations of the power of the women's missionary movement but had no cause to fear an immediate challenge to male control of the denomination. Far from wreaking havoc on the Southern Baptist Convention, the Woman's Missionary Union would play an absolutely central role in the Convention's growth from the 1880s into the early twentieth century.

The WMU's Impact on the Convention

       During the 1880s and 1890s leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention conducted a South-wide campaign to convince local churches and state Baptist conventions to align themselves with the Southern Baptist Convention. This would not be an easy task for a number of reasons. The Convention leaders who wanted to see a strong regional denomination tended to be urban progressives, and most Baptists in the South were accustomed to more locally-oriented, traditional ways of life. Rural Baptists, many of whom would never affiliate with the Convention, understood the local church to be the highest form of religious organization, and they had little interest in domestic or world missions. Leaders of the state conventions did engage in missions work, but they were suspicious of a regional denomination that might exercise too much control over local and state missions activities or over matters of theology. In the decades following the Civil War, many of these state conventions would, in fact, choose to accept the assistance and cooperation of the Baptist societies of the North, a situation that pro- Convention Baptists interpreted gravely. (For more on this, see the Introductory Essay, Home Mission Board, and Sunday School Board.)

       Southern Baptists, along with Americans in general, were unaccustomed to centralized authority in the nineteenth century. Representatives to the Convention came together once annually to make decisions about the Convention's work. In a sense, that annual meeting was the only time that a single Convention existed; during the rest of the year the Convention's work was divided among its Boards: Foreign Missions, Home Missions, and Sunday Schools. The Boards were located in separate cities, had entirely separate leadership, and conducted their own separate work.

       The Woman's Missionary Union was a new type of Convention organization. Because this was a women's organization, it did not enjoy an equal status with the Convention's Boards. It defined itself as an auxiliary to the Convention generally, a Convention that did not exist outside of its separate Boards. In order to act as an auxiliary, the WMU entered into cooperative work with each of the Convention's Boards, providing not only valuable labor and funds, but also binding the separate Boards closer through their mutual affiliation with the WMU. The WMU considered its purpose to be the spread of "missionary intelligence" among the women and children of the Southern Baptist Convention and the collection of funds for missions work, but this purpose would prove broad enough to encompass virtually all of the Convention's work. The WMU was the only organization whose mission and purview were Convention-wide. (For an example of the ways in which WMU leaders fostered communication between the Boards of the Convention, see the Annie Armstrong letters.)

       In addition to working across the Boards of the Convention, the WMU created greater vertical unity by binding local churches and state conventions to the denominational Boards. Far more than any other Board of the Convention, the WMU, with its goal of establishing a women's mission circle (and soon children's organizations) in every church, put laity to work for the Convention. Inspired by the women's foreign mission movement taking place nationally, it was the women of the churches who took up the missions cause before missions was widely accepted by pastors and male laity. And since world-wide evangelism was the fundamental purpose for the existence of the Southern Baptist Convention, it was female laity who would most easily support the Convention's existence and growth. Furthermore, according to the WMU's 1888 Constitution, the significant funds raised by the women of the churches were not to be routed directly to the WMU's Baltimore headquarters or to the Foreign or Home Mission Boards. Money raised by the women was to be sent to the appropriate (male-led) state conventions. State conventions used part of this money for their own mission work and forwarded part to the Convention's Home and Foreign Mission Boards. The WMU, by "disclaiming all intention of independent action," promoted goodwill and cooperation between the local, state, and denominational levels at the same time that the Convention's male leaders were vigorously campaigning for South-wide denominational unity. Auxiliary only in name, the WMU was central to the Convention's success at the turn of the twentieth century.

       Taking local churches and state conventions and molding them into a denomination had everything to do with the creation and promotion of a particularly Southern identity. More significant, then, than fundraising for and correspondence with foreign missionaries was the work that the WMU did on the home front. The WMU worked closely with the Home Mission Board and the Sunday School Board (the two organizations whose primary mission was to gather Southern Baptist churches into the Convention's fold) by contributing to their publications, supporting the work of the Mountain Mission Schools in the Southern highlands, sponsoring a Convention-wide "Missionary Day" to promote missions giving in Sunday schools South-wide, and perhaps most importantly, organizing a graded program of missions education classes (beginning with the preschool-age "Sunbeams") for Southern Baptist children and youth. This program, including groups such as the Girls' Auxiliary (GA's) and the Royal Ambassadors (RA's), continues in Southern Baptist churches today.

       Sunday School Board leader J.M. Frost recognized the importance of the Board's alliance with the WMU to its campaign to become the sole supplier of Southern Baptist churches' Sunday school literature. According to the 1892 Report of the Sunday School Board, the WMU's contribution to the Sunday school series Kind Words promoted the Convention's causes throughout the South:

       Historian Patricia Hill speculates that Southern women participated in home missions in greater numbers than their Northern counterparts because "Southern women were usually not allowed as active a role in foreign mission work as their sisters in Northern denominations played." ²⁰ While it is true that Southern Baptist women chose to remain an auxiliary to the Convention rather than appointing their own missionaries and directing their own missions work, home missions work does not appear to have been their consolation prize. Hill underestimates Southern Baptist women's greater interest in home mission work on behalf of their beloved South, otherwise known as "Our Southern Zion" by WMU President Fannie Heck and other Convention leaders. (For more on this, see the Introductory Essay.

      Individual leaders such as first Corresponding Secretary Annie Armstrong also played a role in popularizing home missions in the South. Armstrong herself worked as a home missionary before and after her tenure as WMU Corresponding Secretary, and her letters reveal a strong interest in uniting churches under the Southern Baptist Convention. At a time when individual leaders played a large role in directing the Convention's future course, Armstrong's apparent disagreements with Foreign Mission Board Secretary Harris, as opposed to her close working relationship with the leaders of the Sunday School Board, may provide a further reason for the WMU's home field emphasis. The WMU, the Sunday School Board, and the Home Missions Board, established within ten years of each other, worked closely together at the end of the nineteenth century to popularize the Southern Baptist Convention all across the South.

Mission Church in San Antonio, Texas

The WMU and Victorian Women

       Clearly the Woman's Missionary Union was instrumental to the growth of the Southern Baptist Convention. Just as significant is the role the WMU played in Southern Baptist women's lives. In her silver anniversary history of the WMU, first president Fannie Heck would write that "women everywhere received the news that women were called to a world-wide endeavor." ²¹ The missions cause provided middle-class women with new opportunities not available in the realm of motherhood and domesticity. Local auxiliary members' experiences learning about mission fields at home and abroad and raising money for the cause brought them outside the home both literally and imaginatively.

       Fannie Heck writes about the difficulty WMU leaders encountered in their efforts to organize women's missions auxiliaries in every church during the 1880s and 1890s. In organizing women for missions the leaders would come up against the widely held belief that women should confine their labors to the home and should not take part in public endeavors -- a belief embodied in Southern Baptists' absolute opposition to women speaking in public. While Southern Baptist leaders had accepted the 1888 organization of the WMU, convincing local pastors to allow an auxiliary and convincing "indifferent" women to participate would prove a challenge.²³

       Becoming active in a local missions auxiliary meant entering unknown territory for many Southern Baptist women. According to one Tennessee WMU member:

       While it would be the job of their daughters (the "New Women" of the 1890s and early twentieth century) to break into the male bastions of higher education and professionalism, the WMU's first generation of women auxiliary members did get a taste of the world of work through their voluntary labor for missions:

       According to Patricia Hill, women selected by local auxiliaries for leadership positions were assured that serving as officers would not be construed as feminism:

       The conservative women in the first generation of the WMU, while they saw no common ground with advocates of women's rights, would nevertheless believe in the importance of women's solidarity for the cause of Christ:

The WMU in the New Century

       The WMU, much like the Sunday School Board, labored during the 1890s to define its work and build support in the South. And like the Sunday School Board, the WMU by the early twentieth century had largely succeeded in its enlistment campaign and would now increase its efforts toward greater standardization and efficiency. As a progressive, modern organization, the WMU would embrace the scientific methods and business practices emphasized in the broader culture, trends that supported a rise in professionalism. While the WMU's leader's celebrated modern trends, including an expansion of the women's sphere, they also expressed a vague anxiety about the secularism that accompanied modernity. (Similar trends were occurring throughout the Convention. See Introductory Essay, Sunday School Board, 75 Million Campaign.)

       Like its sister organizations around the country, the WMU inaugurated a "Study Class" for its local auxiliaries in 1907. While then-president Fannie Heck celebrated the progress to be brought about by the more systematic study of missions, historian Patricia Hill sees different results of this new scientific approach to missions. Hill argues that the Study Class reflected larger cultural trends: toward secularization and professionalized bureaucracies.

       Hill goes on to argue that the Study Class's focus on textbook knowledge and teaching ability shifted the focus of the movement from praying laity to professional leaders.

       In order to train this new professional class of female missionaries and managers, the WMU opened the Baptist Woman's Missionary Union Training School in Louisville, Kentucky (home of the Convention's Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) in 1907. The female students in the Training School took classes at the Seminary alongside the male students in addition to living and taking additional classes at the Training School.

Woman's Missionary Union Training School, Louisville, Kentucky

       In addition to their academic training, the young women of the Training School assisted in running a settlement house in Louisville. The Training School's curricular emphasis on the settlement house marked a trend in the WMU as well as in the larger culture in the early twentieth century: an increasing emphasis on social work and the social gospel as opposed to evangelizing the "heathen." The Convention as a whole would find itself in the early twentieth century wrestling with secular trends such as the social gospel -- in which American progressive reformers began to view people's material circumstances (poverty) as greater threats to the social good than their spiritual states ("heathenism").

       Shortly after the 1907 establishment of the Training School, first WMU President Fannie Heck spent several days visiting the school and observing the young women's activities. She recorded her impressions in her 1913 history of the WMU. Her observations of one of the settlement house's Camp Fire groups reveals this Victorian woman's bewilderment as she observed the mission work of the next generation:

       In her visit to the Training School, Heck had encountered the "New Women" of the Southern Baptist Convention, the next generation of Southern Baptist women who now had far greater social and professional opportunities than the Victorian women who had founded the WMU. While Heck celebrated the opportunities for missions training now available to this next generation, she also recognized that these opportunities posed a threat to the continued power of the WMU. Writing in 1913, Heck worried that "The girl who enters college never returns quite the same. . . . She may drift from her moorings." ³² For Heck, the social gospel emphasis on physical well-being was no substitute for the Christ-centered work of soul-saving:

       Hill writes about similar trends throughout the women's foreign mission movement by the early twentieth century:

       Perhaps in response to the anxiety over modernity and also consistent with the early twentieth century's emphasis on business methods and efficiency, the WMU inaugurated its "Standards of Excellence" program in 1911. According to Heck, "It was time someone set a standard for a 'good' society":

       While its purpose was to promote greater commitment to the missions cause, the Standard of Excellence provided another example of the ways in which the WMU moved from lay movement to professionalized bureaucracy by the early twentieth century. The shift from mite boxes to systematic giving offers a further example:

       Like the Convention-wide 75 Million Campaign begun in 1919, the WMU's program of systematic giving resembled trends toward incorporation taking place in the business world around the same time. Hill would go as far as to compare local auxiliary members to "stockholders" in an increasingly hierarchical, bureaucratized women's mission movement:

       In 1918, thirty years after the controversial founding of the Women's Missionary Union, Southern Baptist Women gained the rights to vote on the Convention floor and to serve on the Convention's Boards. The beginning of more equal rights for women -- American women would finally win the right to vote just two years later -- marked the end of an era in which the WMU (and her sister organizations nationally) provided one of the only outlets for women's achievements. As Southern Baptist women, along with their counterparts nationally, entered the public realms of higher education and the professions, missions work was no longer their only option. While the WMU would continue its denominational missions activities throughout the twentieth century up until today, its high membership rate (proportionate to Southern Baptist female church members) would gradually decline.

       The WMU's highpoint took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when mission work offered women new opportunities for adventure and achievement. This was also the period of the Southern Baptist Convention's enlistment campaign, an effort made successful by the fervent voluntarism of Southern Baptist women.