Making Sense of the Missionary Life of Adele Fielde, Woman of Religious Belief, Science, and Activism

This paper proposes a new narrative of the life of nineteenth-century American Baptist missionary, activist, and scientist Adele Fielde. In the common historical narrative, her separation from the American Baptist Missionary Union (ABMU) after over twenty years of mission service in Siam and China marks her shift towards careers devoid of religious beliefs, in suffrage, activism, and science. Rather than perpetuating this deconversion narrative, I propose that she demonstrated continuity in her beliefs and interests, exercised through diverse careers and starting as a missionary. By looking to biographical accounts by her friends, colleagues, and later historians alongside her writing and life, I highlight her unorthodox Christian beliefs that motivated not only her missionary life but her later careers in science and activism in the US. Reframing Fielde's life in this way offers a more realistic model of the intertwined beliefs and motivations of female missionaries, activists, and scientists in the nineteenth century

Art · Cognitive reframing · Literature · Narrative · Religious life · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious studies · Social Psychology

• When a Field was Found too Difficult for a Man, a Woman should be Sent”

  Open Access•Frederick B Hoyt•Historian•1982

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