"Planking Down the Cash": Woman's Missionary Union's Support of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1919-1945‪.‬

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, millions of American Protestant women supported foreign mission work through what was known as the woman's missionary movement. Organizations that missions leader Helen Barrett Montgomery called "active and ubiquitous Women's Missionary Societies" (1) recruited, sent, and financed female missionaries--especially single women "untrammeled by the duties of wives and mothers." (2) These organizations emphasized women's unique role in working with women and children overseas, often independent of their denominations' mission boards. At the turn of the twentieth century, over forty such societies supported hundreds of female missionaries around the world. (3) For the first time, women guided an entire segment of the missionary enterprise.