For Margaret Moninger -- a brilliant, fun-loving, and dedicated young woman from Iowa -- a career as a missionary in China promised adventure and the chance for responsibility and authority denied most American women of her time. In 1915 she went as a Presbyterian missionary to Hainan Island, China's southernmost territory, where she remained until repatriated in 1942.
During her years in Hainan, Moninger played many roles: she headed a girls' mission school, wrote scholarly articles on the Miao aborigines, collected botanical specimens for scientists at home, and served as mission treasurer. She was responsible for communications with American diplomatic personnel and was one of only six women appointed to the Presbyterian China Council, which set mission policies for all of China.
Kathleen Lodwick's biography, the first devoted to a single woman missionary, is based primarily on the long, newsy letters Moninger wrote her family every Sunday of her missionary years, and on those of a fellow missionary. It will be of interest to scholars in Asian studies, religious studies, and anthropology.