Women’s Stories Day 2025 – Teachers, Healers, and Mothers: Married Women in Mission

Exploring Different Expectations for Missionary Women

Missionary life has never been easy, and it has had its own special challenges for women and men. But in the last part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, expectations were different for women than for men, and they were even different for married women than for single women.

As we celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the RCA Women’s Board of Foreign Missions, Mary Risseeuw, this year’s Hazel B. Gnade Fellow in RCA Women’s Studies, will talk about those differing expectations and their implications in her Gnade lecture, “Teachers, Healers & Mothers: Married Women in Missions,” part of Women’s Stories Day on Saturday, 22 March, 1:00 to 3:00 pm EDT on Zoom. In addition to being the 2024-2025 Gnade fellow, Mary is a genealogist and conference organizer.

Responses to Mary’s presentation will be given by Ina Montoya—an elder at the Jicarilla Apache Reformed Church in Dulce, New Mexico, an educator, avid reader, seamstress, crocheter, and writer who is now pursuing her Doctorate in Missiology and Global Christianity at New Brunswick Theological Seminary—and Katlyn DeVries, who directs the writing center and supports the work of the Gordon H. Girod Research Chair of Reformed Theology at Western Seminary and moderates the RCA’s Commission on History.

The Reformed Church Center celebrates Women’s Stories Day each year with the RCA office of Equity-Based Hospitality & Women’s Transformation and Leadership. As always, this Reformed Church Center program is free and all are welcome, but all participants need to register by clicking here.