The Gospel of Freedom and Power: Protestant Missionaries in American Culture after World War II

Chapter four. Gender

121 chapter four GENDER 1 1 1 In 1950 the Christian Century reported that female self-interest was impeding an important development in missions. The Century was excited about joint efforts between the Foreign Missions Conference (FMC) and the National Council of Churches (NCC)—a movement toward organizational merger. Women, however, were blocking the road to cooperation. They demanded a “cosecretarial arrangement” in the new organization in which a man and a woman would share leadership duties. The Century described the demand as “a resurgence of the ‘feminist’ movement” and lamented that movement adherents “often seem to put its demands ahead of the best interests of the Kingdom.”1 Women would have been as well served by a single-secretary system as men, the article implied. They boasted no need for a separate voice. Although the Century writers seemed baffled by women’s demand for equal representation in the new organization, they should not have been surprised. Women’s fight for power in missions was long-standing. In the late nineteenth century, women began organizing separate mission societies. They raised and dispersed funds, sponsored female workers abroad, and elucidated their own missions theory. By the end of the nineteenth century, women constituted the majority of missionaries abroad and were the backbone of missionary support at home. Notwithstanding their accomplishments, the women’s boards had to wage an oftlosing battle to remain separate in the twentieth century. Maledominated mission boards and denominational agencies mounted several arguments against women’s organizations. Some focused on capability—claiming women could not handle money, for example —while others focused on the damage successful women’s groups did to the larger male-run cause by, among other things, 122 Gender taking money away from the official, denominational boards. According to historian Dana Robert, however, no argument proved so compelling as the one men made in the early part of the twentieth century: efficiency. With efficiency as the stated good, many denominations forced women’s groups to merge with the official boards or significantly limited women’s work. As denominations eliminated women’s boards, members of the growing faith missions movement avoided the trouble of future dismantling by setting themselves up under male control from the beginning. Thus, by the end of World War II, most autonomous women’s boards were a thing of the past. The few that survived underwent merger in the 1950s (e.g., the Woman’s American Baptist Foreign Missionary Society) or saw their power severely truncated (the story of Methodist women).2 The history of women’s missionary boards, like the Century’s complaint about women’s intransigence regarding the proposed FMC-NCC reorganization, could be read as an internecine ecclesial dispute with little importance outside the world of church councils and denominational politics. The disputes, however, involved more than denominational restructuring. They showed a persistent concern that the church speak authoritatively on issues with global implications as well as a usually implicit belief on the part of men that such an authoritative voice would be masculine. The Century’s response to the cosecretarial proposal was part of the Protestant mainline’s postwar world-shaping project. Century writers had several reasons for believing that combining the FMC and NCC would serve the mainline’s leadership agenda. Melding the foreign and the national would integrate the church’s work abroad with the rest of its mission. It would also model the kind of institutional unity that the Century had long championed as necessary for Christian witness and influence. Rather than diluting Christian influence with a plethora of institutions, one organization would study and speak to the central issues of the day. While the Century did not claim that the spokesperson for the new organization had to be male, it did assert that two entities dominated by men most properly spoke to such issues. Women, although long involved in missions in greater numbers than men, contrib- Gender 123 uted nothing to the discussion that warranted making certain that their distinct voices were heard.3 By denying women’s relevance to the discussion and by naming entities led by men as capable of speaking for men and women (a claim not made for the women’s organizations), the Century reinforced the relationship between masculinity and authority, particularly authority in matters international . The Century’s association of men with political power was embedded in a specific historical context—the United States’ postwar ascension to...