White evangelical women, the changing South, and the wider world: the Southern Baptist Woman’s Missionary Union, 1907 to 1943

This thesis examines the culture and racial politics of the most prominent white women's religious organization in the US South, the Southern Baptist Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), from the end of the progressive era to the beginning of the classical Civil Rights Movement. The WMU represents an overlooked force in white Southern intellectual and cultural life–––a woman’s religious network that advanced broadly reformist pedagogical goals within the framework of Jim Crow.

Significant philosophical and practical connections between the WMU and other groups—some socially and theologically liberal and others conservative, some interested in national affairs, others international—demonstrate the importance of women’s networks and mobilities. As the progressive era matured in the 1910s, the WMU leadership adapted ideas on education, world friendship, peace-making, and citizenship that percolated from women’s organizations and international missionary circles to fit the gendered and racial protocols of Jim Crow. By the 1930s, the national and global conditions that supported their progressive initiatives after World War I had changed. Among these changes, Southern lynching received increased scrutiny in the US and abroad, inducing the WMU leaders to experiment with new approaches that combined initiatives on interracial cooperation and mission education, on the one hand, with the reification of racial and patriarchal hierarchies, on the other.

This thesis argues that the WMU put forward ideas about white Christian citizenship using the Lost Cause ideology and missions. The focus on Christian citizenship in WMU publications demonstrates the greater need for scholars to include the WMU in studies of race, the Progressive Era, the South, religion, and women’s history. A close reading of the WMU magazines Royal Service and World Comrades analyzes what the tens of thousands of white Southern women and children who subscribed to them read about patriotism, race, and citizenship at the zenith of Jim Crow. WMU leaders’ correspondence, memorandum, and literature show how the WMU leadership framed crucial global, national, and regional issues.

This thesis considers several key aspects of the WMU in a new light, including the influence of ecumenical and progressive women’s ideas on the WMU’s pedagogy, the pedagogical influence of the WMU in shaping the ideas of white Southern women and youth, and the confluence of missions with the Lost Cause and interracial cooperation. In contrast to much of the Baptist scholarship that positions the WMU as a liberalizing force within the culturally conservative church, this thesis locates the WMU as an interpreter of ecumenical and white women’s socially progressive thought into the white Southern cultural context of Jim Crow. Assuming that Jim Crow was the world’s natural order was not peripheral but a core component of the WMU’s thought as its leaders adapted to the changing world.

By embedding the WMU in its cultural context and critically engaging with scholars who study Black and white Southern women, the influence of foreign opinion on Americans, and evangelical missions, this thesis shows how the WMU leaders depart from the mainstream historiographical understanding of how white Southern women’s conservatism and white Southern evangelicalism developed in the early twentieth century. Prominent white conservative women’s organizations condemned the peace and anti-lynching movements, and Southern Baptists resisted the theological and political liberalism of ecumenical councils during the interwar period. In contrast, WMU leaders encouraged women’s unique contributions to global peace-making, connecting peace and anti-lynching to the Lost Cause paternalism in ways that demonstrate the profound significance of international evangelical consensus. Furthermore, this thesis evaluates the influence of socially progressive ideas about citizenship on the WMU leaders, expanding the study of this missionary organization to include Americanization, nationalism, and the changing status of women and non-white racial groups. Simultaneously, the WMU leaders reinforced racial hierarchies and white supremacy as part of its effort to shape the religious culture of the South and the mission fields beyond through its programs and publications.

The thesis analyzes the WMU as the organization expanded at home and abroad, engaging with regional, national, and transnational discourses on race. Future WMU leaders participated in the vibrant network of progressive women's organizations in Louisville, Kentucky, where they studied at the WMU Training School. Moving to WMU activities beyond the US South, a case study of WMU Training School graduate Susan Anderson’s mission in Abeokuta, Nigeria examines the complex interactions of missionaries, Yorùbá culture, British colonialism, and the nascent Nigerian independence movement. It then traces how Anderson translated Jim Crow’s imperatives of white-over-Black leadership for students and local communities in Abeokuta. WMU leaders also engaged with the internationalism of the Baptist World Alliance as they debated racism, antisemitism, and the separation of church and state at congresses in Berlin in 1934 and Atlanta in 1939. The negative international image of white Southern Christians drove some WMU leaders to join the Association of Southern White Women for the Prevention of Lynching in the 1930s and to work with their counterparts in the National Baptist Convention, feminist and Black social justice leader Nannie H. Burroughs. The WMU developed Baptist interracial cooperation through institutes they sponsored for National Baptist women and by contributing articles to the National Baptist women’s magazine The Worker. Internal disagreements and debates on interracial cooperation finally explain why the WMU's socially conservative leader felt compelled to publicly support the Atlanta Statement on Southern race relations in 1943. The WMU’s blending of missions, the Lost Cause, and citizenship contributed to the evolving cultural climate of Jim Crow, preparing Southern Baptist women and youth to take positions on the social and political upheavals that emerged after World War II.