Chinese and American Methodist Women

The Methodist presence in China grew steadily throughout the nineteenth century. A Central China mission was established in 1868, followed by a North China mission in 1869.

Women Methodist missionaries made significant contributions under the auspices of the Women's Foreign Missionary Board, founded in 1869. Like female missionaries from other denominations, the Methodist women felt they had a special calling to minister to Chinese women. Following the pattern used by their male counterparts, they established schools for girls and women, opened hospitals for maternal and infant care, and organized medical classes to train Chinese women as doctors and nurses. They saw such institutions as important adjuncts to preaching, serving as living illustrations of Christian charity as well as providing arenas where Chinese women could be exposed to the Gospel.

Chinese Medical Missionaries
The most famous Chinese Christian women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, better known by their Anglicized names of Ida Kahn and Mary Stone. Kahn had been adopted as an infant by Gertrude Howe, a Methodist missionary then serving in Jiujiang (Jiangxi Province) in southeastern China. Stone's father, also a native of Jiujiang, was the Methodists' first convert in central China and had become an ordained minister by the time of Mary's birth in 1873. When Mary was eight years old, her father asked Gertrude Howe to oversee her education and train her as a doctor.

In 1892, when both girls were 19, Howe took them back to her home state of Michigan and enrolled them in the University of Michigan medical school. The two lifelong friends graduated at the top of their class in 1896, subsequently returning to China as Methodist medical missionaries.

Chinese reformers lauded the female physicians as models of modern womanhood. At the same time, Western Christian publications held them up as exemplars of Christian charity and living proof that mission work in China was indeed a worthwhile enterprise. Soon after her return to China, Stone became head of the Elizabeth Skelton Danforth Memorial Hospital in Jiujiang, which an American physician had established in memory of his wife. Kahn also worked there before moving to the city of Nanchang to take charge of a new missionary hospital for women and children. Besides personally attending to thousands of patients each year, both women actively trained other Chinese women as nurses and doctors.