"Where is that 'every creature' to whom the gospel call must go?" asked an impressive feminine voice at the 1899 General Conference in South Lancaster, Massachusetts. "Where is that every creature to be found?"
"In all the world," other voices answered from the floor.
"Yes, yes, in all the world," the speaker agreed, "but also somewhere else. The world is very big!"
"Right nearby," offered a cooperative soul.
"How near?" prodded the speaker; then, answering her own question: "Right in your very own home!"
The spokeswoman on this occasion was not Ellen White. Sister White was still far away in Australia. She was instead Sarepta Myrenda Irish Henry, one of the most remarkable women to join the advent movement.
Mrs. S. M. I. Henry had been a prominent promoter of temperance and other reforms for some thirty years before a severe sickness led her to Battle Creek. Treatment and prayer resulted in her healing in 1896, and also in her conversion to the Sabbath. She joined the Adventists assuming that a people with so wonderful a message must be verging on perfection. Disappointed but not at all discouraged, during the few remaining years of her life she bore an effective witness.
On the occasion in question she addressed herself to one of her favorite topics. "The home is the heart of the church," she pointed out, "and the mother in the home is its center of life. What the mother is, so is the home." Before the gospel can be taken to every creature outside the home, she continued, the believers' homes must be equipped with power; and the needed power is readily available to parents and children alike. The Bible says in the book of Acts that the promise of the Spirit "is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call." [1]
Mrs. Henry, though more outstanding than most, was only one of thousands of women whose talent and devotion have contributed to the success of the advent movement.
We have already met several. Mrs. John Couch, you remember, had the Christian courage courteously but forthrightly to interrupt Elder Joseph Bates and introduce Samuel Snow to the congregation, who in turn introduced the congregation to the midnight cry. Mrs. Rachel Oakes introduced the Sabbath to the Adventists in Washington, New Hampshire. Annie Smith cheered the earliest believers wither happy songs. Hannah More was the first to cherish the third angel's message on the continent of Africa. Annie Butler and the youthful Mary Andrews were "first" female missionaries to Europe. A Mrs. Armstrong and Mrs. Catherine Revel were among the first Sabbath keeping converts there. And, of course, Ellen G. White, the inspired and inspirational guide of the whole movement, was herself strictly feminine!
All these and more we have met. But there were many others. [2] Women have exerted a vast influence on the course of Adventism through their dedication to service, the variety of their contributions, their loyalty, and their humility. They have served as secretaries, teachers, nurses, missionaries, and Bible workers, and also as writers, editors, composers, founders, administrators, financiers, and preachers.
Yet for the most part they have served with little recognition. Their salaries have ordinarily been much less than those of men. They have rarely petitioned for higher responsibilities or titles. They have done virtually everything, asked virtually for nothing, and received their reward in knowing that they have done what they could. Let us meet some notable examples.
Though her name is almost forgotten today, Minerva Jane Chapman, sister of Elder J. N. Loughborough, was very well known in Adventist ranks during her lifetime. In 1877 she was elected treasurer of the General Conference. At the same time she was editor of the Youth's Instructor, secretary of the Publishing Association, and treasurer of the Tract and Missionary Society! She served nine years as editor of the Youth's Instructor, refusing to accept any salary for her services in that capacity.
Elder and Mrs. Chapman moved to Battle Creek in 1866 not long after the General Conference was organized and the Civil War was over. She set type by hand for a while but rapidly advanced step by step to become treasurer of the Review and Herald, and then to the responsibilities already mentioned. After retiring in 1893 she continued to live at Battle Creek, healthy and active until the day she died while taking a nap at ninety-four. [3]
Maria L. Huntley was born into one of the first Adventist families to keep the Sabbath in Washington, New Hampshire. In time she became secretary of the Vigilant Missionary Society, that group of energetic, dedicated missionary-minded ladies in South Lancaster, Massachusetts, that we read about in chapter twenty. When their local society expanded into the General Tract and Missionary Society for the whole denomination in 1874, she became its secretary and continued to hold this position as long as she lived--adding first one, then another, then a third, and finally eleven assistant corresponding secretaries to help her. During the 1888 General Conference in Minneapolis she was asked to address the assembly on laid activities. She insisted that "many would gladly work if they knew how," and begged the ministers to develop effective plans for training laymen. [4] In contrast to Mrs. Chapman, Miss Huntley died at the age of only forty-three, while organizing soul-winning activities in Chicago. [5]
In 1866 a fifteen-year-old girl, Maud Sisley, came to Battle Creek and got a job at the Review and Herald. Her father had died some years before while the family was still in England. An older brother was the first to leave for America. When the rest followed, they found him "keeping Saturday for the Sabbath" and joined him in doing the same.
Including Maud and her brother, there were seven children in the Sisley family. Of the four girls, Josephine became a missionary teacher in Australia, Martha worked as a printer at the Review and Herald, and Nelly studied at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, became a nurse, married Elder George B. Starr, and with him accompanied Ellen White to Australia.
And what about Maud? She was one of the first Adventists to pay a full tithe. She became a kind of student missionary, taking a six-month vacation without pay to do self-supporting work in Ohio. In 1877 she went to Switzerland to serve as a single overseas missionary. There she set type in Italian, even though she didn't know the language. Later she returned to America, married C. L. Boyd, president of the Nebraska Conference, and accompanied him to South Africa as part of the first group of Adventist missionaries to non-Christians on that continent.
It deserves to be mentioned that the three boys in this family also became workers in the cause. John became a minister. Robert became a self-supporting missionary and died in a mission field. William (his full name was William Conqueror Sisley) became an architect and builder, designing and constructing some of the main buildings at Battle Creek College, Walla Walla College, Union college, and at other institutions in Australia, South Africa, and England. [6]
What the Sisley family achieved is an indication of their mother's skill and consecration. As mothers, thousands of other Adventist women who also have brought up their children for God have contributed incalculably to the success of the movement.
It should be noted that when the General Conference set up the Foreign Mission Board in 1879, allocating to it the missionary-oversight previously vested in the Executive Committee, three of its nine appointed members were women whom we have just named: Minerva Jane Chapman, Maria L. Huntley (age thirty-two), and Maud Sisley (twenty-eight). [7]
Another famous family in early Adventism was composed of the redheaded "Rankin girls," nearly a dozen of them altogether. Most were teachers, some of them unusually effective.
Ida Rankin was the first dean of women ("preceptress" in those days) at Battle Creek College. Mary Rankin became the mother of Dr. E. A. Sutherland, the man who, with Percy Magan, helped transform Battle Creek College into Emmanuel Missionary College (now the undergraduate school of Andrews University) and later founded Madison College. [8]
The most famous of all the Rankin girls was Helen, who after her marriage to Alma Druillard came to be known as "Mother D." and "Aunt Nell."
Naturally good with figures, Mrs. Druillard was elected treasurer of the Nebraska Conference. After her marriage she was a missionary wife for several years. In 1901 she became treasurer of Emmanuel Missionary College. When her husband died in 1904, she had a sizable family fortune at her command, was sixty years of age--and was about to be launched into a new career.
In that same year, 1904, E. A. Sutherland (her sister Mary's son) and Percy T. Magan, his co-worker, resigned from being president and dean of Emmanuel Missionary College and moved into the South to pioneer Adventist educational work there. Mrs. White was also in the South about this time, visiting her evangelist son, Edson. Edson proposed that they all take a ride on his missionary steamer, Morning Star.
On the first day out, when they needed to make repairs, Mrs. White took advantage of the delay to look at an acreage the brethren had been considering as a site for a new school for underprivileged youth. Much of the land looked poor, but Ellen White was convinced it was the place God wanted them to buy, not only for a school but also for a sanitarium. Back on the boat, every morning for three days she summoned Sutherland and Magan and begged them to find the money and buy the property.
Sutherland and Magan went back again to look the place over. It seemed so bleak that they actually wept! But they resolved to follow the Lord's guidance and determined that Sutherland should approach his aunt, Mrs. Druillard at Emmanuel Missionary College, and ask her to donate the money.
He went to Berrien Springs and made his request. She let him know that she thought the project totally foolish. Sutherland turned to leave.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"To find someone else who will help us. I am going to obey the Lord, come what may."
Soon she was standing beside Mrs. White, looking at the property. On the basis of Mrs. White's assurance, the wealthy lady decided to go ahead.
No one was disappointed. Madison College and Madison Sanitarium grew and prospered, training thousands of students, producing hundreds of graduates, and stimulating the establishment of similar self-supporting institutions all over the South and in countries around the world.
On the day that Mrs. Druillard arrived to assist in this project, Sister White said to her, "Nell, you think you are just about old enough to retire. If you will come and cast in your lot with this work, if you will look after these boys [Sutherland and Magan, still in their thirties] and guide them, and support them in what the Lord wants them to do, then the Lord will renew your youth, and you will do more in the future than you have ever done in the past."
Words truly spoken. Mother D. did cast in her lot for the poor of the South. God sustained her through a ripe and active old age. She died at ninety-four after founding yet another institution, this one entirely for black people, Riverside Sanitarium. [9]
Kate Lindsay grew up in a large family in the same Wisconsin farming area as did the Rankin girls. Granddaughter to a cousin of David Livingstone's and fascinated with what Florence Nightingale was doing in England and the Crimea, she left home for Battle Creek in 1867 to offer her services to the little Western Health Reform Institute that Adventists had started up the year before. Soon she was off to New Jersey for a two-year nursing course, and then to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor as a member of the second group of girls ever allowed to take the medical course there. One of ten girls among 1300 men, she took her share of ridicule and skeptical remarks, but when she debated in favor of women's franchise, she won the day and the boys' respect. Ultimately she finished first in her entire class.
Arriving back at the Western Health Reform Institute, now renamed the Medical and Surgical Sanitarium, she specialized in women's and children's diseases about the same time that John Harvey Kellogg became the institution's medical director. Being a fearless and persistent soul, she at last persuaded Kellogg and the board to start a nursing school in 1883, which she continued to champion and guide till she left for Africa in 1897. Later she served in the Boulder Sanitarium in Colorado.
Punctual, thorough, and tenderhearted, Dr. Lindsay made an unforgettable impression on thousands of nurses, doctors, and patients. During her years in Battle Creek her only home was the little room next to her office! She wished to be continuously available for service. And it is because of her devotion that Kate Lindsay Hall, the dormitory for student nurses at Loma Linda University, is named in her honor. [10]
Georgia Anna Burrus volunteered for service as a single-woman missionary and became one of the first Seventh-day Adventist workers in India. It was brave of her to go so far without either husband or family. Just before she landed, a terrible loneliness struck her. At the depth of her homesickness she dropped her watch on the deck and it stopped running. She had lost her last friend! She thought forlornly that if only she could hear it tick again she could carry on and be a missionary! Kneeling in her stateroom, she begged God to pity her and make the watch run again. God loved her for making so simple a request. (She didn't ask to return home. That never entered her mind.) Fearfully yet trustingly she picked up her timepiece and held it to her ear.
It ticked!
And it never stopped. She had no more trouble with it. She went right on into India, her homesickness entirely removed. Later she married Luther Burgess, another missionary, and together they spent thirty-two years pioneering among the various peoples of that subcontinent. On a furlough to America taken so that Elder Burgess could receive medical treatment, they found that the General Conference had no money to send them back. Mrs. Burgess went out on the streets and sold 20,000 copies of "Bible Training School" at ten cents a piece to buy their tickets herself. [11]
Speaking of women missionaries to India, we must not forget Anna Knight, the first black missionary to that country. As a child in Mississippi she had learned to read sooner than any of her playmates and was converted to Adventism by reading Signs of the Times and Steps to Christ. After a period of study at the Adventist academy in Graysville (forerunner to Southern Missionary College), she returned home 380 miles for a summer vacation. The community ridiculed her. On Sabbaths she took her Bible, Sabbath School Quarterly, Sabbath School Worker, Review and Herald, Youth's Instructor, a dog, and a revolver out into the woods. The dog was to fend off wild hogs. The revolver was to fend off people! (As a child she had made her own bows and arrows and was reputed able to hit a knothole at 100 yards.)
Later at the Battle Creek Sanitarium she became a nurse. Dr. Kellogg took special notice of her and had her appointed a delegate to the great 1901 General Conference. In that same year she went out as a nurse to India.
In India she colporteured, taught school, nursed, and mingled with wealthy and poor alike all over the northern and eastern parts of the country. Untiring, sustained by constant prayer, she was guided, healed, and even fed by a succession of miracles.
Once weak from hunger after thirty-six hours without food or water while traveling by train, she looked behind her in her compartment and was astonished to see on the seat a plate of bread and a cup of warm drink. As she gratefully ate, she expected that at any moment the unusually dressed stranger pacing back and forth on the platform would put his head in at the window and ask for his pay. But when she finished and tried to return the dishes to him, he had disappeared.
In due course Miss Knight returned to her school work in Mississippi; then she went on to start the first "colored" YWCA in Atlanta. She served as Home Missionary, Missionary Volunteer, Education, and Sabbath School secretaries all at once for the southeastern and Southern Unions, her only office at times being her trunk and her handbag. Finally she settled down to be a mother to Oakwood College. She had traveled, not counting her time in India, half a million miles, had conducted nearly 10,000 meetings, and had handwritten or typed 49,000 letters. [12]
Many other women have contributed to the story of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, helping fulfill its commission to tell it to the world." We cannot entirely pass up Lora Clement, daughter of Melissa Rankin (and hence a Rankin girl herself), who edited the Youth's Instructor, predecessor to Insight, for an amazing twenty-nine years, during which her column, "Let's Talk It Over," was one of the most appreciated literary productions in the denomination.
How many thousands of women have made contributions as Sabbath School leaders and teachers? Flora Plummer, secretary (that is director) of the General Conference Sabbath School Department from 1913 to 1936, wrote many books, and, of course, was assisted by innumerable women and girls in local Sabbath Schools around the world.
What about teachers in elementary schools, academies, and colleges? Martha Amadon has been succeeded in Adventist education by who knows how many thousands of women! And time would fail to tell of the host of women who serve and have served as writers, matrons, secretaries, stenographers, bookkeepers, and librarians, and in countless other positions in the church, not excepting the pulpit.
Ida Riggels Burden, for example, Sabbath School secretary of the Oregon Conference in the early twentieth century, was a frequent worship-hour speaker, and she was only one of many women preachers. The wife of Elder E. B. Lane was widely known as a preacher and carried a ministerial license in her own name, though not the ministerial "credentials" of the ordained minister.
Ordination of women was discussed at the 1881 General Conference, stimulated it may be by the fact that the Seventh Day Baptists had recently ordained some women. In America during the Great Depression and in Europe during the second world war women served unordained as local pastors. Their ordination to the gospel ministry is much discussed in the 1970s, and several in the United States have been ordained as local elders. At the same time considerable interest has been shown in a statement made by Ellen White in 1895 apparently endorsing the ordination of women to a kind of deaconess or welfare-worker role: "Women who are willing to consecrate some of their time to the service of the Lord should be appointed to visit the sick, look after the young, and minister to the necessities of the poor. They should be set apart to this work by prayer and laying on of hands." [13]
There was a strong feminist movement in the United States in the nineteenth century as well as in the twentieth; like its later Counterpart, the nineteenth-century movement called at best for the restoration of legitimate rights and clamored at worst for free sex and anti-motherhood. The Seventh-day Adventist response a century ago was an emphasis on the role of women as capable office holders and as teachers and guides of the young at church, in school, and especially at home. After all, it is not to diapers that "unliberated" mothers are chained but to little people formed in the image of God and capable, when mature, of spreading the message to the world. Indeed, even when young, children are among the "every creature" to whom the gospel must go, as Mrs. S. M. I. Henry so aptly observed.
Ellen White was emphatic and constant in exalting these aspects of noble womanhood, but she did not do so one-sidedly. She also called for the redress of womanly grievances and demanded, in the name of the Lord, proportionate remuneration for womanly labor. Wrote she: "The Lord has a work for women, as well as for men. They may take their place in His work at this crisis, and He will work through them." [14] "God is a God of justice, and if the ministers receive a salary for their work, their wives, who devote themselves just as disinterestedly to the work as laborers together with God, should be paid in addition to the wages their husbands receive, notwithstanding they may not ask this." [15] "This question is not for men to settle. The Lord has settled it. You [she wrote to the leadership] are to do your duty to the women who labor in the gospel." [16]
When James White ordained a minister by a lake in the summer of 1867, he at least asked the minister's wife to kneel beside her husband on the basis that she was being set apart as his helper. He thought such a practice should be followed at all ministerial ordinations. [17] When Robert H. Pierson accepted his re-election at the 1975 General Conference session in Vienna, he asked his wife to stand at his side as a symbol of all workers' wives who share their husbands' burdens.
Happy the wife who can share her husband's burdens directly. Many, especially when the children are small or their husbands are away, must share their burdens at a distance. With reverence we read tender lines that Angeline Andrews (then in her late thirties) penciled into her diary day by day around the year 1860: [18]
"I miss my husband very much. Seems as though I could not endure the idea of his being away several months longer."
"I can hardly be reconciled to his long absence. How my heart would pound to meet him again. He is one of the kindest and best of husbands."
"I want John to do just right."
"It is my earnest desire that God's hand may guide him."
"There is a want in my heart which remains unfulfilled. I do not seem to get much satisfaction either in making or receiving letters."
"My dear husband has come! How precious the moment of meeting."
"My dear husband left this morning on his way to join the Minnesota tent. Sad moment, these parting scenes!"
Notes: