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ARTICLE VI PIONEER WOMEN SERVE MISSION FIELD
Our last article and this one are devoted particularly to the part women played in the growing and developing church, following the Civil War.
It seems appropriate to mention some of the courageous pioneer women who had a leading part in the early days of foreign and home missionary work in the northern and southern branches of the Methodist Church and the Methodist Protestant Church and Evangelical United Brethren, which today constitute the United Methodist Church.
The women's work today is known as United Methodist Women.
Dr. William Butler and his wife, Clementina Rowe Butler, were the first missionaries of the Methodist Episcopal Church (northern branch).
They went to India in 1857, and from the first, Mrs. Butler was deeply concerned about the plight of Indian womanhood.
She worked and prayed for their health and education, and to gain support of the women back in America.
In 1869, she returned to Boston and was one of the eight women who organized the very first Woman's Foreign Missionary Society.
At that time, the church would not send out single women but this group did, Miss Isabella Thoburn went as a teacher and Dr. Clara Swain accompanied her.
Miss Thoburn started a school for girls, which later became a college, highly respected and distinguished and named Isabella Thoburn College, in Lucknow.
Dr. Clara Swain began her work of healing and founded a hospital in Bareill. • The Clara Swain Hospital was the first place in India where suffering women could be brought for treatment in Christ's name.
In later years, when the trend was toward training nationals to take responsibility and assume leadership, daughters and granddaughters of these earlier women were taught by later missionaries and educated in other Christian schools.
Some with special promise were helped to come to the United States for further training and are graduates of Scarritt College and George Peabody College of Nashville, Tenn. and others.
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Mrs. Juliana Hayes of Baltimore who was the first President of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of M.E. Church, South, organized in 1878, was very much interested in helping women and children in other lands.
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