ABSTRACT
It took several decades before other Protestant missionary societies followed the example of the ABCFM. How many wives were lost in the process of not counting the wives? The only way to estimate is to make an educated
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Protestants, the ABCFM did just such an estimate for the first 78 years of its existence, when it sent out 817 men and 1,157 women, of whom 357 were unmarried. That leaves 800 missionary wives for 817 men, which sounds high given our knowledge of the presence of unmarried men in the mission field, but also gives some sense of the normality of marriage, and the ubiquity of the missionary couple, in Protestant missionary circles. In 1889 the ABCFM reported 160 wives and 175 male missionaries, which also sounds high at 90 percent but makes a figure of 80 percent for British missionaries sound relatively safe.
