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Notes to chapter 8 start on page 268 157 IN November of 1885, a group of about fifteen women headed by train to the meeting of the General Board of the new Woman’s Missionary Society to be held in Kingston. Afterwards, Elizabeth Sutherland Strachan wrote to her cousin, Martha Cartmell, in Japan, “At Belleville several of the M.E. Ladies came on board the train when Mrs. Carman overheard some remark that surely there must be some Woman’s rights meeting on the way. This she turned to very good account in her impromptu speech at the reception, saying that she felt at first like resenting the remarks and explaining, and then she thought well sure enough is it not a woman’s rights meeting? What is her right but a happy Christian home, the privileges of a sister, wife, mother, these we enjoy and are only seeking to extend them to our sisters in heathen lands.”1 The members of the Woman’s Missionary Society were active participants in the widespread movement of “woman’s work for women.” Before the Methodist union in 1884, Carman’s husband had been bishop of the Methodist Episcopal church, and he was now one of the two superintendents of the Methodist Church of Canada. The activity of the WMS was respectable and not radical, and it is not surprising that Mary Carman eschewed any association with the potentially radical women’s rights movement.2 As she stated, however, women’s missionary societies saw themselves as working for the rights of non-Christian women, believing that “heathen” women suffered severe disadvantages that would be overcome if the societies in which they lived accepted the Christian gospel. Furthermore, the women of the missionary societies believed they were called to evangelize women. This was in part because women in many cultures were not accessible to male missionaries, but there was an additional reason. The WMS women also shared with other Canadians a high valuation of the role of “mother” and “home” in the “A broader culture, a wider experience”: The Work of the Missionary Society CHAPTER 8 spiritual and moral nurture of their children and husbands, and they assumed that women played this same role in the societies where they sent missionaries. Yet women of the missionary societies were affected by their work. As will be seen in chapter 9, many became part of the Social Gospel movement, and some did take an active role in support of women’s rights. Even within the story of their more traditional missionary endeavours , however, there is an interconnection between what the WMS women did and how they—and others in their families, their congregations, and their communities—were affected by it. Promoters of work for missions termed this a “reflex influence,” and often made high claims for it. When the president of the Dartmouth auxiliary spoke at the Nova Scotia Branch meeting in 1889, she “referred to woman’s part in the great work to which Christ has called his Church, and of the reflex influence this work has upon those engaged in it; enlarging our sympathies, increasing our interest in high and noble things, deepening our own spiritual life, and multiplying our joys.”3 It is the story of this activity and this effect that follows. Local Work: Education The strength of the Woman’s Missionary Society lay in its local auxiliaries , sometimes large, but frequently small, that were founded in city, village, and country churches across the land. Members of the auxiliaries that were organized in the early years of the group saw it as part of their task to encourage women in other congregations to take up the work. Thus, for example, in January of 1885, the women of the Brunswick Street auxiliary, Halifax, “decided to write to Lunenburg, Pugwash, Bridgetown, Amherst, and Truro, either to the clergyman’s wife or some active lady in the church, and when they are willing to meet, to send ladies from our Society to organize auxiliaries.”4 As the Brunswick Street women recognized, it was often a minister’s wife or sometimes another woman who exercised unofficial leadership in the congregation, who provided the first impulse towards organizing. Some ministers took the initiative, but the WMS women perceived others as impediments.5 Both women in the society and male leaders of the denomination were occasionally moved to refute fears that if women organized for the support of missions, other causes might suffer . Their repeated arguments suggest that...

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