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WOMEN IN THE AMERICAN EPISCOPAL CHURCH l 269 gram. One of the most well-known missionaries is Annie Funk (1874–1912), who went to India as a teacher in 1906. When her mother became ill, Funk booked passage home on the Titanic and, according to oral tradition , gave up her place in a lifeboat to someone else and so lost her life at the age of thirty-eight. Single women were also often the pioneers in opening inner-city missions in urban centers like Chicago and Toronto at the turn of the century. Women missionaries from “plain” churches faced unique dilemmas as they sought, out of evangelistic zeal, to bring people to Christian faith but in doing so were compelled to enforce Anabaptist peculiarities on newcomers to the church. Women had the special task of teaching converts the importance and nuances of dress codes, especially the wearing of a head covering. Christmas Carol Kauffman (1901–1969), fiction writer and mission worker in Chicago, expressed her dual roles of helping the poor and converting people to Mennonitism in a 1935 diary entry: “Dec. 16. Gave out one covering and fed two tramps” (151). For women who did not assume church-related vocations , women’s organizations offered a specifically female venue for women to express themselves within church life. It has been said that women’s organizations within the Mennonite church function as a “parallel church” in which women exercise leadership in performing some of the roles that were historically unavailable to them in the main institution. Because Mennonite religious values included the maintenance of social boundaries, women were historically discouraged and sometimes prohibited from participating in the activities of women’s organizations in wider society. Thus beginning in the late nineteenth century, they began to carve out a space for themselves under the umbrella of malerun Mennonite church institutions. In the context of their own organizations, often referred to as mission societies or sewing circles, women sewed and knitted for charitable causes and also engaged in Bible study, prayer, and devotional discussion. This relatively autonomous women’s activity did not progress without opposition. In the late 1920s, the Mennonite Women’s Missionary Society, based in Ohio and led by Clara Eby Steiner (1873–1929), was effectively taken over by the church’s mission board and its male leaders, who were threatened by women’s success in raising funds and supporting overseas missionaries. They may have feared the potential influence this would give women in the area of missions overall. Without question , however, the grassroots material work and fundraising of women’s organizations have provided the foundation on which such Mennonite bureaucracies as Mennonite Central Committee, which engages in relief and development around the world, have been built. Women of the conservative Anabaptist groups, such as the Old Order Mennonites and the Amish, do not have formally constituted organizations. But they nevertheless meet in each other’s homes to quilt and sew for themselves , for sale to outsiders, and for charitable causes. Women in North America who adhere to various Anabaptist traditions today find both strength and limitation in a history that offered new opportunities for the expression of faith while also delineating sometimes rigid roles for women within small sectarian communities . The working out of the tension, or balance, between spiritual equality and social inequality continues to be foundational to the diversity that exists for Anabaptist women today. SOURCES: A good survey volume on women of Anabaptist traditions is Kimberly D. Schmidt et al., eds., Strangers at Home: Amish and Mennonite Women in History (2002); James C. Jahnke, Vision, Doctrine, War: Mennonite Identity and Organization in America 1890–1930 (1989). For information about women in early Anabaptist communities, see C. Arnold Snyder and Linda Huebert Hecht, eds., Profiles of Anabaptist Women: Sixteenth-Century Reforming Pioneers (1996). For women as North American pioneer settlers, see Royden K. Loewen, “ ‘The Children, the Cows, My Dear Man and My Sister’: The Transplanted Lives of Mennonite Farm Women, 1874–1900,” Canadian Historical Review 13.3 (1992): 344–373. On Mennonite domestics, see Frieda Esau Klippenstein, “ ‘Doing What We Could’: Mennonite Domestic Servants in Winnipeg , 1920s to 1950s,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 7 (1989): 145–166. Material on Mennonite women in World War II includes Pamela E. Klassen, Going by the Moon and the Stars: Stories of Two Russian Mennonite Women (1994); Rachel Waltner Goossen, Women against the Good War: Conscientious Objection and Gender on the American Home Front, 1941–1947 (1997); and...

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