Prominent US Leader of Women’s Mission By the 1960s, Sadie Wilson Tillman, who was born in Tennessee, and grew up a member of a small rural church near Lewisburg, had become one of the nation’s most prominent church women. From 1924 to 1927, she was Director of Christian Education at Laura Haygood Normal School, in...
Unselfish Servant and Medical Missionary to the Philippines Dr. Hawthorne Darby served as a medial missionary in the Philippines for the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society. Born in Colfax, Indiana, she graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana in 1914, and from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in Philadelphia in 1923. She served internships at...
Missionary to Italian Immigrants in Wisconsin Louise Johanna Nienas was born in a sod house in Thompson, North Dakota and spent her early years on a North Dakota “free claim.” The family later moved to Wisconsin, where Louise received a degree in elementary education. Working as a public school teacher in Racine, Wisconsin, she volunteered...
Mission and Hymn Translator Elida García de Falcón was orphaned at the age of ten in Guerrero, Tamaulipas, Mexico. She made her home with her only sister, Rosaura, who had married one of the first Mexican Methodist ministers, Pedro Grado. With them she itinerated and attended mission schools, including Holding Institute at Laredo, Texas. She...
Raised Funds for Mission Through Her Disability From her home, in Casey, Illinois, Lizzie Johnson raised over $120,000 for missions. A back injury at age thirteen steadily worsened until, at age twenty-seven, she was unable to raise her head from the pillow. She could move only her hands and forearms. Interested in mission work, she wanted...
The Amazing Adventures of Methodist Women in Mission This comic showing the history of Methodist women in mission is available at www.unitedmethodistwomen.org/responsecomic. It is also available as a PDF: www.unitedmethodistwomen.org/assemblycomicbook.pdf.
A Methodist and an Activist Mai Gray, the first African-American woman to be president of United Methodist Women, was deeply dedicated both to the Methodist tradition and to fighting segregation. Born in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1922, Gray worked with her husband, a Methodist pastor, to build a coalition of leadership in the Central Jurisdiction, the...
Pioneer in establishing schools for women and girls Hester Williams, “Aunt Hester,” was a former slave who had little formal schooling, yet she pioneered in establishing schools for women and girls in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 1882 Hester Williams addressed the Louisiana Annual Conference and told of her work among the freedwomen. She had “a...
Founder of Woman’s Missionary Society of the Evangelical Association At age twenty, Minerva Strawman was invited to a missionary tea given by the Woman’s Missionary Society of the United Brethren Church. Delighted with what she saw and heard, she asked her father, a minister and member of the Board of Missions of the Evangelical Association,...
Pioneer missionary among the Navajo Widowed at an early age, Mary Eldridge entered the United States Indian Service and went to work at Haskell Institute, a training school for clerical and commercial work, in Lawrence, Kansas. From there she went to a school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to work among the...
