Living by faith: Maritime Baptist single women missionaries in India, 1880-1930

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thousands of North American women and men ventured overseas to serve as missionaries in Asia, Africa, and South America. Among these were Baptists from Canada's Maritime Provinces who, as heirs to the legacy of Henry Alline, stressed the evangelical tenets of conversionism and activism. In keeping with this tradition, Maritime Baptists encouraged women's active participation in their faith. Thus, soon after Maritime Baptists established their first independent foreign mission in India in the mid-1870s, single women were given a key role in the prosecution of the enterprise.;Like other mainstream North American Protestants, Maritime Baptists utilized the provision of educational and medical services to promote their mission; however, unlike other groups as portrayed by some historians, Maritime Baptists never wavered in their focus on the salvation of the individual as the principal goal of the mission over the fifty years, from 1880 to 1930, covered by this study. Thus, whereas some historians have argued that many other Protestant missionaries shifted their focus from soul salvation to social service, this study argues that Maritime Baptist missionaries, keeping rigidly to their evangelical path, utilized social service as a means towards "winning souls for Christ.".;United by the common bonds of their evangelical faith and by their shared geographical, educational, and family backgrounds, the thirty-four single women who served with the Maritime Baptist mission during this period shared the vision of a Christianized India. And, moreover, the women shared the firm belief that they had been called by God to serve as missionaries in India. This belief in their calling, which they expressed in their own words and which was evidenced by their activities both on and off the mission field, is the key to understanding why these women, who had viable secular career options, chose to serve for as long as they physically could in the difficult conditions of the Telugu region of India.;The desires of the single women of the Maritime Baptist India mission may best be understood by using the concept of vocation, wherein the secular is supportive of the spiritual, and social services are tools to facilitate spiritual ends. Vocation neatly applies to the circumstances of the single women, as it recognizes the primacy of the spiritual--namely, the belief in divine calling--without lessening the importance of secular abilities in accomplishing spiritual ends.;By using vocation as an analytical tool, and by recognizing the strength of the Baptist position within Maritime society, and, most importantly, by letting women's voices come to the fore, it becomes clear that the motivations and activities of Maritime Baptist single women missionaries differed from the portraits drawn by historians of other Protestant women missionaries. These differing portrayals call for a reassessment of women's involvement in foreign missions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with careful consideration given to both spiritual and secular components.