In addition to her English name, her parents gave her the Chinese name Mei Fuh, meaning "beautiful happiness".
In 1955 they began L'Abri, a community that welcomed people who were seeking intellectually honest and culturally informed answers to questions about God and the meaning of life.
[9] Her autobiographical The Tapestry: the Life and Times of Francis and Edith Schaeffer (1981) won the ECPA award in 1982.
[10] Schaeffer's The Hidden Art of Homemaking (1971) has been influential among women in the Christian Patriarchy movement,[11] and has been described by Kathryn Joyce as "perhaps unintentionally, a landmark book for proponents of biblical womanhood.
[12] In 2000, Schaeffer was listed in Helen Kooiman Hosier's 100 Christian Women Who Changed the Twentieth Century.