Charlotte White

Charlotte White (b. July 13, 1782, d. December 25, 1863) was the first unmarried American woman missionary sent to a foreign country. She was sponsored by the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions and arrived in British India in 1816.

Early life

Charlotte "Susanna" Hazen Atlee was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Judge William Augustus Atlee and Esther Bowes Sayre. She married Nathaniel Hazen White in 1803. He died in 1804 and the couple's one child died in 1805. Charlotte White joined the First Baptist Church in Haverhill, Massachusetts in 1807.[1]

Missionary to India

White's application to become a missionary with the newly founded Baptist Board of Foreign Missions was controversial as many members of the Board believed that only ordained males should be appointed missionaries. White was accepted as a missionary in a restricted appointment as a helper and companion for the wife of George Henry Hough, a missionary printer being sent to India, and with her assurance that she would be sustained by her own resources.[2]

White remained only briefly with the Houghs on arrival in Calcutta, India, marrying a widower with three sons, Joshua Rowe (1781-1823), a missionary with the English Baptist Missionary Society,(BMS) shortly after her arrival in 1816. Charlotte, now Mrs. Rowe, transferred to the BMS and the couple managed missionary schools in Digah, near Patna, India. Charlotte wrote a Hindustani language spelling book for children. In 1823, a letter from Charlotte was published, without her permission, accusing four prominent missionaries at Serampore College of expropriating property belonging to the Baptist Missionary Society.[3]

Joshua and Charlotte Rowe had three children. Rowe died in 1823. Charlotte remained in India until 1826 before returning to the United States with her children, Charlotte (1818-1852), Esther (1818-1851), and Judson (1823-?).[4]

Later life

White taught English, music, and drawing in an academy at Lowndesboro, Alabama in the 1830s.[5] She died December 25, 1863 in Philadelphia.[6]

gollark: If people are randomly assigned (after initial mental development and such) to an environment where they're much more likely to do bad things, and one where they aren't, then it seems unreasonable to call people who are otherwise the same worse from being in the likely-to-do-bad-things environment.I suppose you could argue that how "good" you are is more about the change in probability between environments/the probability of a given real world environment being one which causes you to do bad things. But we can't check those with current technology.
gollark: I think you can think about it from a "veil of ignorance" angle too.
gollark: As far as I know, most moral standards are in favor of judging people by moral choices. Your environment is not entirely a choice.
gollark: If you put a pre-most-bad-things Hitler in Philadelphia, and he did not go around doing *any* genocides or particularly bad things, how would he have been bad?
gollark: It seems problematic to go around actually blaming said soldiers when, had they magically been in a different environment somehow, they could have been fine.

References

  1. Barber, Edwin Atlee Genealogical Record of the Atlee Family Philadelphia: Wm. F. Fell & Co, 1884, pp. 80-81
  2. Anderson, Gerald H. Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdman's Publishing Co., 1991, p. 727; Proceedings of the Baptist Convention for Missionary Purposes, Philadelphia, 1814, pp. 65, 112
  3. The Reformer, Vol. 4, April 2, 1823, pp. 73-79
  4. Brackney, William H The A to Z of Baptists Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009, p. 605; Missionary Herald, 1827, p. 293
  5. Anderson, p. 727
  6. "Charlotte H. Howe, https://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?indiv=1&dbid=2535&h=344170&tid=&pid=&usePUB=true&_phsrc=nRu413&_phstart=successSource, accessed 2 Feb 2018
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