The New Activity of Woman

Woman’s present prominence in Christian work provides a new incentive of immense value and power. The progress of Christianity has made in woman’s estate a complete inversion. Once, by a strange perversion of God’s creative word, she was accounted a helpmeet for man — not his correspondent or counterparty as the original implies, but his subordinate and servant, or, at best, his helper — that is, man, the superior and sovereign; woman, the subject and servant. And so, even in the Jewish body of believers, woman scarcely ever comes to the front. Miriam, Deborah, Anna the prophetess, are the rare exceptions in Hebrew history, in which woman is submerged and out of sight. With a curious significance Paul writes: ‘* Help those women which laboured with me in the gospel,” as though they were now leaders in holy service, and men must come to their help. Through Christ and His gospel she who was first in transgression, is becoming first in holy consecration and missionary devotion; in the family, the radiant centre of attraction; in the Church, the disseminator of missionary intelligence, the kindler of enthusiasm, the organizer of systematic benevolence. Woman goes abroad as teacher, nurse and medical missionary, and in endurance and endeavour rivals the most patient and valiant; or, as wife and mother, shows what Christ makes of her sex; and not only joins her husband in work, but sometimes equals and even outdoes him in service. One-third of the unevangelized can best be reached by woman, and a large part of them can be reached by her only, as they are inaccessible to man.

Medical missions afford a new field for the sisterhood of Christ. From the reach of this noble auxiliary to missions, the zvoinen of the Orient, and especially of India, were long shut out by the rigid laws of the zenana, the seraglio and the harem. Even heathen doctors had to them no access. In Syria a physician was called to prescribe for a favourite wife of a dignitary, but was not allowed even to see her tongue or feel her pulse; and when he insisted that no medical aid could be given without such examination, a female slave was made to thrust out her tongue and reach out her hand through a rent in the curtain, that he might examine his patient by proxy. And so, as late as 1878, Mrs. Weitbrecht wrote: “All Hindu women are, in time of sickness, utterly neglected. Prejudice and usage banish medical help.” And hence, fever, ophthalmia and other contagious ills bred their awful progeny unchecked among women and children.

But now, what a change! All India clamours for capable women who are trained nurses and qualified physicians. The Presbyterian Female Hospital at Lucknow, opened ten or eleven years .since, had thirteen patients the first year; but three years later, 212, beside 2,712 outside patients and 6,930 distributions of medicine. The movement has ceased to be provincial and become national; the work at Lucknow and Lodiana, Travancore and Amritstar, is extending over the great empire.

Five years ago, the medical missions of China were scarcely less numerous than in India, extending from Hong Kong and Canton to Peking, and even into Manchuria and Tartary and Formosa. The whole force then at work, male and female, was upwards of eighty. The hospital at Swatow, opened by Dr. Gauld in 1863, had in 1888 two hundred inmates, treating six thousand patients a year.

It is a strange fact that the law of sex runs through all Christian work. The feminine element is needed as well as the masculine. Man may be aggfressive, bold, strong, fitted to pioneer, organize, administer; but woman is patient, impressive, tender, sympathetic, fitted to win, to soothe, to comfort, to minister. Both together bring to the work the complete furnishing that leaves no element of adaptation lacking. And hence, when less than fifty years ago women began to organize work among themselves, gather money, scatter information, send out women and undertake their support, qualify for medical missionaries, and educate their own sex for intelligent co-operation in securing the spread of the good news, the effect was felt from the centre to the circumference of the whole sphere of Christian service. And the end is not yet!