Annie Armstrong - Woman's Missionary Union

Woman's Missionary Union

In 1888, Armstrong led the creation of the Woman's Missionary Union, helping draft the constitution and serving as its first correspondent secretary (a position that functioned as executive director).

In her role as the head of the organization, Annie Armstrong facilitated communication between denominational leaders, local congregations and missionaries on the field. She was an extensive letter writer, handwriting 18,000 letters in one year alone.

During her tenure as head of the WMU, Armstrong refused a salary and traveled at her own expense on behalf of the WMU.

Read more about this topic:  Annie Armstrong

Famous quotes containing the words woman, missionary and/or union:

    “We agree fully that the mother and unborn child demand special consideration. But so does the soldier and the man maimed in industry. Industrial conditions that are suitable for a stalwart, young, unmarried woman are certainly not equally suitable to the pregnant woman or the mother of young children. Yet “welfare” laws apply to all women alike. Such blanket legislation is as absurd as fixing industrial conditions for men on a basis of their all being wounded soldiers would be.”
    —National Woman’s Party, quoted in Everyone Was Brave. As, ch. 8, by William L. O’Neill (1969)

    “The missionary is no longer a man, a conscience. He is a corpse, in the hands of a confraternity, without family, without love, without any of the sentiments that are dear to us.... Emasculated, in a sense, by his vow of chastity, he offers us the distressing spectacle of a man deformed and impotent or engaged in a stupid and useless struggle with the sacred needs of the flesh, a struggle which, seven times out of ten, leads him to sodomy, the gallows, or prison.”
    —Paul Gauguin (1848–1903)

    “I not only rejoice, but congratulate my beloved country Texas is reannexed, and the safety, prosperity, and the greatest interest of the whole Union is secured by this ... great and important national act.”
    —Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)