| Martha Foster Crawford (1830–1909) was one of the first women to seek appointment by the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, formed in 1845. Convinced that God had pre-ordained her to be an evangelist, Crawford left Alabama in 1851 and lived for more than fifty years in China, where she chose to die and be buried. Perhaps the first woman to address the Southern Baptist Convention, Crawford was a Southern Baptist feminist whose theology and worldview developed from her evangelical frontier culture's emphasis on independence and individualism. Her Christian feminism, her marriage to Tarleton Perry Crawford, her role in and ultimate repudiation of Woman's Work for Woman, her leadership of the independent Gospel Mission and its subsequent fundamentalist faith mission, her apostolic primitivism, and her conversion to relationship-based missiology altered the course of Southern Baptist missions in America and North China.*; *Originally published in DAI Vol. 59, No. 11. Reprinted here with corrected abstract. |
