Evangelicalism by John G. Stackhouse Jr

Author:John G. Stackhouse Jr. [Stackhouse Jr., John G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190079703
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

She continued as a maverick. She married out of caste and then, when her husband died after only two years, refused to sequester herself as a widow out of public sight. Instead, she took up the cause of educating all women and emancipating them particularly from child marriage. Her voice, and that of her Arya Women’s Association, became so powerful it eventually influenced British policy on both issues.

In 1883, still in her mid-twenties, she traveled to Britain to pursue medical studies. Increasing deafness disqualified her, but while there she converted to Christianity. After touring the United States and Canada (she lectured also in Japan and Australia) and authoring a book promoting women’s rights, she returned to India. In 1896, during a severe famine, Ramabai (the “bai” is an honorific for “elder sister”) toured the villages of Maharashtra with a caravan of bullock carts and rescued thousands of outcast children, child widows, orphans, and other destitute women. She brought them to the shelter she founded in Bombay—later moved to Pune and then moved again outside the city after opposition arose because of conversions to Christianity. The resulting mission had a kindergarten for young children, a range of schools, a hospital, a refuge for “fallen women,” cloth-weaving looms, printing presses, tailoring and handicrafts, a flour mill, an oil press, a laundry, a farm, orchards, and wells.

By 1900 there were upward of 1,500 residents in the Mukti mission. In addition to administration and teaching alongside her daughter, Manorama, as her trusted confidante and coleader, Ramabai managed to translate the Bible into her mother tongue—Marathi—from the original Hebrew and Greek. Indeed, she completed the revision of the final drafts only hours before she died in 1922, her worn-out daughter having passed away just months before. But the Mukti mission continued as a center of Pentecostal revival. Reviled by many in her lifetime as both a critic and an apostate of Hinduism, Ramabai was eventually honored in 1989 by a stamp issued by the government of India. The Pandita Ramabai Mukti Mission was active well into the twenty-first century, providing housing, education, and vocational training for widows, orphans, and the blind.

To be sure, women also came to the mission field as wives and mothers to exemplify and teach a more civilized way of making a home. Such a strategy was part of the “Christianize and civilize” dual mission of so many Europeans to Asians and Africans. Missionary women also helped to staff schools for girls that trained them not only in the faith and in homemaking, but also in skilled domestic service and even academic subjects—such that some traditionalists, both white and indigenous, became nervous about the elevated status of non-white women such treatment implied. Meanwhile, the inspiring accounts and testimonies of missionary women published in magazines and books back home helped to bolster the status of women in churches and families in the North Atlantic “sending” countries as well.

Evangelicals thus manifested a paradoxical understanding of gender roles in Christian endeavor. The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation enhanced the status of women with the right hand but took away opportunities with the left.

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