Educating the Women of Hainan: The Career of Margaret Moninger in China, 1915-1942.(Brief Article)

By Kathleen L. Lodwick. Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995. 255 pp. $35.00.

In this book Lodwick deftly weaves snatches of letters sent home from the mission field into "Margaret's story" (p.10), a pleasantly readable memoir of a Presbyterian missionary from Iowa posted to Hainan Island to do "women's evangelistic work" (p.158). Margaret Moninger was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Grinnell College and a trained teacher; she headed more than one mission school for girls in Hainan, itinerated among inland minority peoples, held administrative offices within the mission, and had the honor of representing the mission at meetings of the denomination's council for all China missions. Moninger also edited a book on Hainan, which is off the coast of southern Guangdong province, and studied the island's flora, sending botanical specimens to Harvard and elsewhere.

Lodwick's command of the full range of archival materials that give evidence of Moninger's life and work on her own terms leads the author to conclude that the missionary found in China opportunities for "service," as well as "fun and excitement" (p.217), that American society likely would have denied ...