Burton, Margaret Ernestine (1885-1969)

Proponent of women’s education

Burton was born into a mission-minded, Baptist family. Her father, Ernest D. Burton, had considered being a missionary but due to bad health had become a pastor and professor instead. After growing up in Newton, Massachusetts, where her father taught Greek at Newton Theological Institution, Burton moved to Chicago in 1892 when her father became Chair of the New Testament Department at the University of Chicago. In 1908, the university sent her father on a Rockafeller-funded study of the educational conditions of the Far East. Twenty-three-year-old Burton accompanied her father on this trip, visiting schools, taking photographs, and focusing on the state of women’s education. When she returned in 1909 she continued to research the history of education in China and Japan, publishing her findings in The Education of Women in China (1911) and The Education of Women in Japan (1914). In both these studies, Burton opens by asserting that while women’s education was not a modern phenomenon in China and Japan, the increased availability of education for women was a result of the modern, missionary movement. She spends the majority of each book describing some of the women graduates of the mission schools, the schools these women founded, the government schools that followed in their wake, and the growing acceptance of women’s education in Chinese and Japanese society.

In her early books, Burton asserted the importance of women’s education and the need for continued missionary support. Women, she argued, had great influence in society, which should be channeled by giving them access to quality, Christian education. She identified the situation in Japan as “one of grave danger and of challenging opportunity,” with the country poised to embrace either Christian faith or secularism. Articulating a position in line with the missiology of ‘Woman’s Work for Woman,’ Burton argued that only by educating the women could Christian missionaries hope to convert Japan.

In her later years, Burton revised her missiology, referring to her earlier positions as smug and saying, “I hope I may be forgiven for them.” Like so many missiologists after WW1, she began to think of mission in terms of partnership and ‘World Friendship.’ In New Paths for Old Purposes: World Challenges to Christianity in our Generation (1927), she described the world as a neighborhood, in which the problems of one country affect other countries and there is no clear line between home and foreign mission. She also grew more critical of her own culture. As she was preparing a map of the unevangelized portions of the world for an exhibit at the Chicago Coliseum, she realized the arrogance and futility of such a map, since unevangelized areas exist “in your city and mine as well as in Calcutta and Osaka.”

All her life, Burton was committed to women’s education and articulated a holistic position on the relationship between evangelism and education. She was a member of the Board of Education of the Northern Baptist Convention and was on the Executive Board of the Association for Adult Education. She served as Secretary for Foreign Students of the National YWCA for five years and then as the Executive Secretary of the Department of Education and Research of the National Board of the YWCA. In 1921, she returned to China as a member of the China Education Commission, a joint venture between North America and Britain to see the effects of industrialism on Christianity in China. She included some of her observations from this trip in New Paths for Old Purposes, in which she urged Christians to address not only education but also other social issues like child labor and race relations. Burton’s holistic approach to mission and her passion for students brought her into contact with the leaders of the Student Volunteer Movement and ecumenical movement, and she counted as friends people like Sherwood Eddy, Helen Thoburn, and Mrs. Robert E. Speer. In a time marked by the dissolution of the women’s missionary movement and the mission movement at large, Burton continued to assert the need for missionary heroism and sacrifice and to call this missionary spirit “a golden thread through the church’s history.”

By Anneke Helen Stasson

Bibliography

Digital Primary

Burton, Margaret E. Comrades in Service.

_____. The Education of Women in China.

_____. The Education of Women in Japan.

_____. Mabel Cratty, Leader in the Art of Leadership.

_____. New Paths for Old Purposes: World Challenges to Christianity in our Generation.

_____. Notable Women of Modern China.

Primary

Burton, Margaret E. The Assembly of the League of Nations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941.

______. Assurances of Life Eternal. New York: Crowell, 1959.

_____. Comrades in Service. New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1915.

_____. The Education of Women in China. New York: Revell, 1911.

_____. The Education of Women in Japan. New York: Revell, 1914.

_____. New Paths for Old Purposes: World Challenges to Christianity in our Generation. New York: Missionary Education Movement and Council of Women for Home Missions, 1927.

_____. Notable Women of Modern China. New York: Revell, 1912.

_____. Mabel Cratty, Leader in the Art of Leadership. New York: The Woman’s Press, 1929.

_____. Women Workers of the Orient. West Medford, Mass.: Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions, 1918.