Unsung Heroines

March 2009

Women in Global Mission

by Anne Basye

That’s what Cousin Mary said to my mother, a recent college graduate in 1952, as she pondered her future. Mary, then in her 60s, was the type of relative who helped family members in crisis; she was the one who nursed ailing parents or tended grieving survivors.

She stayed home on the farm, but she found the lives of missionary women exciting. Imagine how Mary must have followed the adventures of women featured in mission magazines.

Since North American Lutherans started working overseas in 1842, female nurses, doctors, teachers, and eventually pastors have shared their gifts and their faith, blazing new trails for women in times when opportunities were limited.

“Even being a nurse was really a bit far out,” recalled the late Ruth Sigmon, missionary in India, during an interview that is part of the Women in Global Mission Oral History Project. “You were a teacher or a teacher or a teacher.”

Or a wife and mother. Or a stay-at-home caregiver like Mary, a faithful contributor to her congregation’s Board of Foreign Missions.

When Ruth died in 2008, she was eulogized by friends from her 42 years in service. The ELCA Global Mission unit added its praise in a letter to her family. But her name never appeared in any news release or magazine article, until now. The contributions of women of Ruth’s generation—whose careers began when women were excluded from ordination and whose fame was built outside the North American church structure—have mostly been overlooked.

Now it’s time to change that and lift up the stories of several women who served in global mission and acted boldly on their faith in Jesus Christ.

Marjorie Bly, Taiwan

When Marjorie Bly told friends she wanted to be a missionary, they said, “How can you be a missionary? You don’t play the piano, you don’t sing, you don’t speak, and you don’t ride a bicycle!” But Marjorie knew that her nursing skills, acquired through the St. Olaf College-Fairview Hospital Nurses Program in Minnesota, would be useful. In 1946, she began serving in China through the Lutheran United Mission.

By 1949, all western missionaries were told to leave China. After a furlough, Marjorie moved to Taiwan in 1952 and began working among lepers under the auspices of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, later the American Lutheran Church. As a nurse in the mobile clinic based at the government leprosy hospital in Hsin Chaung, she observed that the most severe cases came from Peng Hu. “If we could reach patients in Peng Hu before their condition became crippling, they could be spared a degree of handicap,” she wrote.

In 1955, she was granted permission to move to Peng Hu where she began a dermatology clinic through the outpatient department of a hospital that provided follow-up care and treatment for patients and their families.

Marjorie stood out in a culture that ostracized leprosy patients and forced families to bury their dead by night in unmarked graves. She fought for the dignity of her patients and integrated them into the general hospital program. One Taiwanese health official said that Marjorie gave “three-way care: body, soul, and social acceptance.”

In 2006, long after her 1989 retirement, she reported that she knew of no new leprosy cases in the past two years and that the stigma of being treated for the disease was almost gone.

“Margie never wanted to be known for the great things she did for others,” said Betty Brandt, a relative. When Marjorie won the Special Contribution Award from the Taiwanese government, she said, “Give the prize to my patients. They are not only cooperative, they are also brave.”

In spring 2007, Chen Shui-Bian, President of the Republic of China (Taiwan), presented her a special award. When she died at age 89 on April 8, 2008, her life was celebrated by her many friends in the Taiwanese Lutheran Church, where for four generations she had celebrated weddings, births, graduations, and grieved illness and death. Marjorie was buried near her home in Peng Hu, where a statue in her honor is being erected in a nearby park.

Ruth Sigmon, India

During her interview for service in India, Ruth Sigmon was asked “whether I knew a sick chicken and whether I could bake a cherry pie.” Her new boss “thought we’d better get down to the nitty gritty” and find out how she would fare in a foreign country. Born in 1921, she was commissioned as a missionary in 1944 by the Women’s Missionary Society of the United Lutheran Church in America. When she left Baltimore for a 21-day sea voyage to India on a converted fruit ship, she expected that her service would last a lifetime—“a lifetime of sharing Jesus Christ.”

From 1945 to 1988, Ruthie directed and worked in rural and social programs in the Andhra Evangelical Lutheran Church (AELC) in Andhra Pradesh, India. Known for always being on the move—“no one could keep up with Miss Sigmon, whether she was walking through a village or cycling around Guntur town,” said friend and fellow missionary Anne Fichthorn.

In her first 25 years, Ruthie supervised Bible women who taught Christianity in villages. She also promoted religious education, youth work, women’s groups, and adult literacy. She helped establish Praja Seva Samstha, an ecumenical group that offered day care, health care, permanent housing, education, and income-generating projects to people living on the streets of Guntur— many of them women and girls.

In her role as missionary, she was often treated with the same respect as a man received. Still many of her ideas were not adopted. Her support for women’s ordination seemed to have no effect until 1999, when the AELC ordained 17 women. Her commitment to women continued throughout her retirement, and when she died in 2008, she left nearly $200,000 to the ELCA Global Mission unit for programs and projects for women in Asia.

Rosie Kameo, Indonesia

“I grew up in Iowa but have served as a missionary in Asia most of my life— first in India, then Hong Kong, and lastly Indonesia,” says Rosie Kameo, who retired in 2008 after nearly 40 years of missionary service.

Fresh out of St. Olaf College in 1964, Rosella taught English at the Schade Girls’ Higher Secondary School in Rajahmundry, Andhra Pradesh. After earning her master’s degree in library science at Montana State University in Bozeman, she directed the library at the Lutheran Middle School in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Rosie then moved to Indonesia to teach English at Satya Wacana Christian University—and was fired for marrying a local resident.

“In 1979 my services were terminated because I did not marry a Westerner, but an Indonesian national,” she said. The Asia area secretary of the Lutheran Church in America (LCA) told her that while men could marry natives, women could not. So, she lost her job.

When the LCA rescinded that rule, Satya Wacana asked Rosie to resume teaching. For 25 years, she alternated between teaching English and directing and consulting on library projects at the university where the student body was 30 percent Muslim. She and her husband, Daniel, made their home on the Indonesian island of Java and raised a son who now works in the United States.

As an American from a culture focused on individualism who married an Indonesian from a culture focused on community, Rosie learned how to live in both traditions. She funneled that experience into course materials for Satya Wacana classrooms.

Understanding culture as an iceberg, Rosie appreciated what lay under the surface. For example, once she caught a student copying from another during final exams. When she called them into her office, the first student readily admitted she had copied from her friend’s answer sheet. When Rosie asked the other student why she allowed it, the student answered that she saw nothing wrong in helping a friend.

“As an American, I was culturally conditioned to see it differently.”

Rosie was honored for her 34 years of service in 2008 during an ELCA Summer Missionary Conference, along with Jim and Karen Noss, who retired after 32 years of service in Cameroon.

Not enough ink

Maybe women missionaries are overlooked because they’re modest. A friend of Ruth Sigmon’s commented that while Ruth made wonderful presentations about mission work in India, “she did not speak of her own work and accomplishments or the hurdles she had to overcome in dealing with church politics.”

Perhaps, the ELCA does not have an adequate way to recognize all the lay missionary heroines who serve God and community. In 1973, when Marjorie, Ruth, and Rosie were in missionary service, about one-third of the 25 missionary “units” in India were single women. Multiply that by the hundreds of missionaries in service that year, and the scope of the challenge to recognize all female missionaries looms large.

And if it’s tough for single women missionaries to get recognition, consider the plight of the missionary wife serving with her husband. In 1973, 11 women serving in India with their husbands were completely outside of official church recognition structures.

“Single women (missionaries) were more acknowledged than (missionary) wives!” says Joyce Bowers, author of The Global Mission of the ELCA and Its Predecessors and a missionary to Liberia with her husband, Louis, from 1966 to 1977. And don’t get her started on what happened to female missionaries who married male missionaries while in service: “It was like they dropped off the face of the earth!”

If every one of those faithful women were remembered in print, there would be no room for articles on any other topic!

On the other hand, bureaucratic issues do prevent lay women missionaries from being acknowledged.

In my opinion, the conventional benchmarks of “importance” that determine whether someone gets an obituary or a post-mortem profile are still heavily weighted towards men. Within the ELCA, ordination is a big factor—disqualifying women who served before 1970. And so Marjorie Bly, honored by the Taiwanese government, was not mentioned in the ELCA’s own media on her death because she wasn’t quite “famous” enough and wasn’t ordained.

Let’s take a moment to thank God for the witness of those faithful bold women. And let’s look for new ways that their gift to the church and to the world can be remembered and celebrated within the church.

Anne Basye is associate director for global resources in ELCA Global Mission.