Woman's Board of Missions records, 1862 -- 1927

In January 1868, Congregationalist women in Boston organized the interdenominational New England Women's Foreign Missionary Society. By the following September, the constitution was altered to limit their relationship to collaboration with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The name of the organization then changed to the Woman's Board of Missions and was incorporated March 1869. The focus of the WBM was "to co-operate with the American Board in its… labor for the benefit of women and children in heathen lands, to disseminate missionary intelligence and increase a missionary spirit among Christian women at home and to train children to interest and participation in the work." The Woman's Board of Missions was also committed to supporting single women missionaries. Members believed that the United States was too vast for one organization to cover the nation; therefore the Woman's Board of Missions of the Interior was formed in the Chicago area in 1868 and the west coast formed the Woman's Board of Missions of the Pacific in 1873. By 1887, the Woman's Board of Missions supported ninety-eight female missionaries, forty-eight bible women, twenty-seven boarding schools and 239 village day schools. Women from various missionary societies created the World's Missionary Committee of Christian Women in 1888 with Abbie B. Child of the WBM elected Chair. The Woman's Board of Missions continued independently until 1936 when it merged as one with the ABCFM.