Educating the Women of Hainan: the Career of Margaret Moninger in China, 1915-1942
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University of Kentucky UKnowledge History of Religion History 2014 Educating the Women of Hainan: The Career of Margaret Moninger in China, 1915-1942 Kathleen L. Lodwick Pennsylvania State University, Allentown Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Lodwick, Kathleen L., "Educating the Women of Hainan: The Career of Margaret Moninger in China, 1915-1942" (2014). History of Religion. 9. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_history_of_religion/9 [ducatin{l the 11lomen ofJfatnan This page intentionally left blank [ducatin{! the 71lomen of}fatnan The Career of Margaret Moninger in China 1915-1942 l(ATHLEEN L. LODWICK THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Copyright © 1995 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lodwick, Kathleen L. Educating the women of Hainan : the career of Margaret Moninger in China, 1915-1942 I Kathleen L. Lodwick. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-0-8131-5630-9 l. Moninger, Mary Margaret, 1891-1950. 2. Women missionaries China-Biography. 3. Women missionaries-United States-Biography. 4. Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Hainan Mission-History. 5. Presbyterian Church-Education-History. 6. Women-Education China-History-20th century. I. Title. BV3427.M516L63 1995 266'.51 '092--dc20 [B] 94-29319 For my mother and father, l(athryn Elizabeth and Algha C. Lodwick) for their love and encouragement. This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword by David D. Buck 1X Acknowledgments Xlll Introduction 1 l. Joining the Hainan Mission, 1915 13 2. The Young Missionary, 1916-1921 46 3. Turmoil and Flight, 1922-1927 95 4. Come Rejoicing, 1928-1935 138 5. Warfare, 1936-1942 170 Conclusion 211 Notes 218 Bibliography 244 Index 247 Illustrations follow page 96 This page intentionally left blank Foreword AS A HIS T 0 RIA N, Kathleen L. Lodwick, it seems, was inevita bly drawn into the huge trove of Mary Margaret Moninger's letters once she discovered their order and clarity in the Presbyterian Mission archives. Miss Moninger's letters record in measured weekly installments her twenty three years as a missionary on Hainan Island. These letters were written in an open, balanced schoolmarm's hand with a favorite Waterman pen on Sunday afternoons and posted by long stages, overland and overseas, in order to present to her family a seemingly casual, but carefully crafted, portrait of her life as a teacher, a missionary, and a member of a remote and small American mission community. These letters are newsy and in timate in a familial, conversational manner and consequently speak al most as clearly across the years separating us from Margaret Moninger as they did to her family in Iowa. Kathleen carefully edited the letters, supple mented them with forays into other archives, as well as with interviews, and wove these materials into a narrative that follows closely the chro nology of Margaret Moninger's service and limits itself to the subjects that Miss Moninger herself raised. Kathleen felt little need to impose an interpretive scheme and skillfully and unobtrusively lets Margaret Moninger speak for herself. Much of Margaret Moninger's life remains in shadows, but Margaret herself intentionally created those spaces where we cannot see, and rather than speculate about them, Kathleen shows us Margaret's self-portrait in a careful chronological narrative structure built around the stages ofMar garet Moninger's missionary service: begun deliberately with understated X Foreword by David D. Buck commitment, established and maintained with determination, punctuated by sabbatical leaves or by political upheavals, and ended not really by World War II but by her own illness. The result is a view through an intended window into Margaret Moninger's life. The values reflected in these letters and this life are familiar to stu dents of the American missionary movement of the nineteenth and twen tieth centuries. Margaret Moninger was part of a community of people dedicated to, indeed often truly absorbed by, their calling. Wherever they went in the twentieth century, they built American-style churches, houses, schools, and hospitals. They taught and preached about Christianity and lived a distinct Protestant American form of their universal religion. They usually retained their American dress, as much of their American food as possible, and their established social practices. Frugality, sobriety, moral uprightness, restraint, devotion to work, cleanliness, and order were evi dent everywhere in their lives and activities. They maintained a familiar American schedule with its seven-day week, its regular five-and-a-half day round of work regulated by the clock, a pause for personal matters on Saturday afternoons and evenings, and its enormously busy day of rest each Sunday, with services, special meals, and-for Margaret Moninger-a long family letter to be written. Kathleen's account preserves for us so clearly that sense of establish ing an American order in China, where housing, food, dress, the daily round and indeed the longer schedules of time, and the cycles of work and rest were arranged in completely different ways. She provides some hints of how Miss Moninger and her fellow missionaries-like all teach ers-knew that simply establishing and preserving their own order was a key to their endeavor. A subject that these letters consistently underplays is the role 9f mis sionary activity, but here Kathleen has found other sources that reveal to us how sure Margaret Moninger was in her trust that Christianity in its American Protestant practices would fit the lives of the young girls in her school and the women in the villages she visited. She can tell us little of Margaret Moninger's personal, emotional life. No one is ever named as an object of her affections; even mention of her emotional ties to her family members is deeply muted. To maintain her privacy, Margaret Moninger burned the letters she received from her family and adhered to the mission practice of addressing other missionaries for mally, as Miss Skinner or Dr. Morse. Missionaries had different ways of dealing with the emotional isolation of life in a mission station. We have Foreword by David D. Buck xi no idea how or when such springs of feeling may have opened for Mar garet Moninger, but that is as she intended. Kathleen is able, however, to provide some truly wonderful insights into Margaret as a person taken from the letters of a fellow missionary, Esther Morse, M.D. Dr. Morse, who shared a house with Miss Moninger for many years, in her letters gives us some sense of the energy, strength, and determination that Margaret successfully dampens in her own let ters, as well as a much better measure of Margaret's likes and dislikes than she would ever permit herself to reveal. Clearly, Margaret Moninger was more determined, assertive, and controlling than she revealed to her family. Recent studies such as William Hutchinson's Errand to the World (1987), Jane Hunter's The Gospel ofGentility: American Women Mission aries in Turn-ofthe-Century China (1984), and Irwin Hyatt's Our Or dered Lives Confess (1976) present rich historical interpretations of the missionaries and their roles in Chinese and American life. Pearl S. Buck, in her prize-winning but largely forgotten biographies of her parents, The Exile (1936) and Fighting Angel (1936), provides well-textured psy chological portraits of missionaries and their lives in China. Kathleen is familiar with all of these books and indeed is much more widely read in the literature produced by and about China missionaries than I am, but she does not build her account around any of these interpretations. Instead, as I have suggested, she lets us see Margaret Moninger through her own words with the added and welcome insights of Esther Morse. As I finished reading this book in manuscript, I was reminded of Jonathan Spence's truly marvelous biography, The Memory Palace ofMatteo Ricci (1984), in which he dispensed with most elements of chronological narrative. Instead he organized his account of the famous Italian Jesuit missionary to China around the mnemonic system (the "Memory Pal ace" of the title) and certain key images that embodied Ricci's missionary approach to the Chinese as chapter headings and topics. Consequently, the narrative structure of the biography itself dropped the familiar child hood-to-death chronology and took on the character of Matteo Ricci's own mind. We see him using the mnemonic device of a memory palace to master the spoken and written language of the Court and pursuing his missionary work by introducing key concepts into his exchanges with Chinese. The result is a challenging biography that forces readers to step outside the familiar way of reading about others' lives and to apprehend Ricci's own ways of thinking before they could proceed. xii Foreword by David D. Buck Certainly such an approach would have appealed to Margaret Moninger, for she wrote her letters to create a certain image of her life in China. And indeed, that is what Kathleen has provided in her biography.