A woman missionary could rank public calling above child care and win respect

Evidence

Yet she spent little time in the actual role of mothering. She admitted taking her son periodically with her on missionary trips, but more often the care of the younger children fell to older siblings, other family members, and a number of “good women secured from time to time.” In fact Broughton noted that all her children were taught domestic duties at an early age. The eldest daughter, Elizabeth, fixed suppers for the family and “was always solicitous about her mother’s comfort.”2? Although she wrote lovingly of her children in her autobiography, Broughton undoubtedly valued her missionary work above every other responsibility. This is clearly revealed in the case of her daughter’s illness. Broughton canceled a missionary engagement to join her sick daughter Selena, who died a few days after her mother’s return home. She never again canceled a missionary engagement, for her daughter’s death had taught her that “she could stay home and sit by the bedside of her children and have all the assistance that medical skill could render, and yet God could take her children to himself if he so willed it.”3° What may seem callous by today’s standards was not viewed as such by Broughton’s household. Broughton describes her last hours with her daughter as loving spiritual moments that influenced all of the family members to “think seriously of heavenly things.” Her single-minded devotion to missions did not result in censure or condemnation by her community. Broughton commanded the respect of the women in her community and black Baptist women across the nation. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 603

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This quietly undoes an easy assumption that ‘politics of respectability’ meant conformity to domestic ideals. The community’s highest respectability figure openly prioritized mission over mothering—her authority as a public religious actor was so secure it outranked maternal duty. A dense revision of what respectability licensed.
• STORYSTEM: A vivid seed: a period where a bereaved mother decides her late child’s death authorizes her to never choose family over calling again—the death functioning as divine permission to devote herself wholly to public work. The inversion of expected grief-narrative is powerful.
• CANDY: Broughton’s theology of her daughter’s death—that staying home ‘with all the assistance that medical skill could render’ still couldn’t save her—is a striking, summarizing line of its own.
• XREF: connects to: Church women claimed greater practical missionary power than ordained theologians — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 115

Broader Connections

• Church women claimed greater practical missionary power than ordained theologians #expands (0.72) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 115