Taken together, they supported nearly two hundred unmarried women at a time who were laboring in evangelistic, educational, and medical lines with missionaries of the ABCFM, receiving appointment, as did others, by the Prudential Committee.
They demonstrated great efficiency in organization, grouping their local Auxiliaries into Branches, and reaching a large constituency and kindling zeal in missionary work.
In 1871, such a thing as a dispensary for women was unheard of, and the few higher school buildings were inadequate; in 1891, the largest of these Boards has more than US$200,000 invested in such Christian monuments.
In 1871, the American Board had 43 single women in missionary service-a larger number than had the ten other leading societies of America and Great Britain combined.
[1] This Board aimed, by extra funds, efforts, and prayers, to cooperate with the ABCFM in its several departments of labor for the benefit of women and children; to disseminate missionary intelligence and increase a missionary spirit among Christian women at home; to train children to interest and participation in the work of missions.
[1] At the first anniversary of this meeting, more than 600 women were present and they reported 129 life members, two auxiliaries, an income of US$5,033, and seven missionaries in the field.
[1] In 1887, the territory covered by this Board was scarcely more than the State of California, which contained but 115 Congregational churches, 81 of them being aided by the Home Missionary Society.
Its members were European and American women residing at the Hawaiian Islands, and it was almost entirely officered by descendants of the early missionaries there.
[1] The Board sustained a missionary in a girls' boarding-school on Ponape, and another among Hawaiian women of the islands, and shared in efforts for the Chinese among them.
[1] Life and Light for Woman, the joint publication of the three Boards in the United States, was published monthly in Boston, at 60 cents per annum, and had about 16,000 subscribers.
Daily prayers, meetings, Sunday school and church service were a part of the curriculum that had to be accepted by every parent.
It was directed and supported by the Evangelical Armenian community, there being no Americans in the place, except the women who taught the school.
The salaries of these women were paid in the U.S.[1] The boarding-schools and colleges were distributed as follows: South Africa, 2; European Turkey, 2; Asia Minor, 17; India and Ceylon, 11; China, 6; Japan, 7; Micronesia, 2; Mexico, 3; Spain, 1; Austria, 2.
[1] At Inanda, in Zululand, the school-girls in 1888 harvested potatoes, corn, beans, pumpkins, and other vegetables and fruits sufficient to supply one third of the table necessities for a whole year, and planted 138 trees on Arbor Day.
At Marsovan, the girls cooked, washed, cleaned house, cleansed the wheat and rice, pickled dry beef and fruits.
In Madura City, India, they pounded their rice, cooked their food, cut and made their own garments, and sometimes for the catechists' families as well.
Two women at Harpoot, Turkey, after teaching for years, devoted themselves to the arduous life of itinerating among the sixty out-stations of that field.
In Stamboul, two carried on city missions in the form of Sunday-schools, coffee-house tract-distribution, mothers' meetings, prayer-meetings, and night school.
In North China, at Kalgan, Tung-cho, Pang Chuang, and Pao-ting-fu, the whole missionary work was in that stage of development when hand-to-hand evangelistic labor was demanded, and several women give themselves to it exclusively.
The land was purchased with the gifts of 553 Japanese, and the buildings provided by friends in the U.S., especially young women of the Interior Board.
The head of the training-school was Miss Richards, who left the post of superintendent in the Boston Hospital to assume these duties, and the clinics were divided between Dr. Berry and Dr. Sara Buckley.