Chapter One The World Before Her She was perfection. That late spring day at Fairhaven, where he had preached a sermon, how the congregation wept as they sang the parting hymn. Then the pews emptied, and all in the church gathered around the young woman who had once taught their children. The devout in this southern Massachusetts seaport marveled, as did pious evangelicals everywhere, at her decision to marry him, a missionary bound for the Ottoman Empire that very summer. How brave she was, how selfless--and how soon would they all read of her exploits in popular religious monthlies like The Missionary Herald. It must have been a quarter of an hour before the crowd finally gave way and he could reclaim his prize. They were already almost famous. Being the center of attention was nothing new to Martha Parker.

She had drawn admirers long before these last several weeks as the engaged pair made their farewell visits to family and friends in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Some of the most heartfelt tributes came from young men at Dartmouth College, one of whom sighed that she was "possessed of many charms" and "these have secured for her an abundant tribute of flatteries, caresses and admiration." Her elders praised Martha, too. "Lovely" was the word that often came to mind among the teachers and ministers who extolled her Christian character and winning ways. She was pretty, it seems, though no portrait survives. She was accomplished, her lively intelligence cultivated by a year of schooling at a private academy. She was devout, a religious seriousness intensified by losses early in her life. Her eldest sibling, twelve-year-old Leonard, had drowned in a millpond when Martha was five; her father, William, sickened and died six years later.

Through it all, her faith held firm. And now, much to Elnathan Gridley''s satisfaction, she was nearly his own. After traveling through New England in June, they would wed and shortly thereafter set sail for the island of Malta, then on to Beirut, part of Ottoman Syria. How providential, he reflected, that adulation had not spoiled his fiancée. Being so popular, as she confided to him, had made her "accustomed to caresses," but all that "tribute" was unwelcome, "beyond what she desired," because, as they both knew, the sin of pride feasted on a surfeit of praise. Such sentiments reflected the evangelical Calvinist culture pervading rural New England, the milieu in which the two had been raised, one that deemed ambition suspect and self-regard among the worst of sins. From her earliest youth, Martha recalled, she had taken those teachings to heart and felt drawn to a life of sacrifice for others. No sooner had she received some assurance of saving grace and found "peace in believing" than she "desired to spend my life on heathen shores," converting the rest of the world.

Modest and self-effacing as she was, when Elnathan first sounded her out on the subject of marriage, she had demurred and "looked in vain for an excuse from engaging in so great a work." It was only some six months later, after being encouraged by him and her family, that Martha at last saw "the finger of Providence point[ing] me plainly.to Western Asia." Somewhere in that part of the world, she would labor with him as an "assistant missionary." She would organize and teach in schools that boarded and educated local children. And she would reach out to their mothers, striving to challenge the customs that kept them subservient. Other fingers had also pointed Martha Parker in the direction of foreign missions, most of them attached to mere mortals at Bradford Academy. Founded in 1803 by some forward-thinking inhabitants of Essex County, Massachusetts, it was one of many institutions springing up in the early republic, often under evangelical auspices, that offered sons--and a growing number of daughters--from elite and middling households an education more advanced than the rudiments taught in the common schools.

When Martha attended Bradford Academy in the years around 1820, women considerably outnumbered men in a student body of nearly two hundred, and many, like her, came from some distance and boarded with local families. The academy reserved training in Latin and Greek for those young men headed toward college and instruction in navigation for the sons of merchants and master mariners, but male and female students alike received a firm grounding in English grammar and composition, arithmetic and geography. Bradford also offered its female students some of the "ornamentals"--drawing, embroidery, and painting--genteel accomplishments that reinforced geography lessons. Students drew maps on paper, embroidered them on silk, or painted them on velvet. Their conservative religious beliefs did not keep these committed Calvinists from numbering among the new nation''s staunchest proponents of formal education for young women. "It is pagan to keep the female sex in ignorance," one leading evangelical periodical pronounced, so women must "illuminate their minds," to keep from being "compelled to think that their sphere is that of the butterfly, to flutter in useless gaiety and wandering thoughtlessness." (Hence the deliberate omission of dancing and French classes in Bradford''s offering of "ornamentals.") A pious Middlebury College student and future missionary agreed, lecturing his sister that ignorance was "a mark disgrace" in women because of the essential role that they stood to play in promoting social progress and the spread of their evangelical faith.

Such were the convictions that prompted Bradford''s citizens to launch the town''s academy and to take particular pride in its predominantly female clientele. According to Isaac Bird, one of Martha''s brothers-in-law, she ranked among the school''s most promising graduates. He cherished "higher hopes" for her than for anyone else within the Parker family circle and described her letters to him as "a treasure, an intellectual feast." Evangelicals'' prominent role in their founding fostered a deeply religious atmosphere at schools like Bradford Academy. Every day there began and ended with devotions led by the preceptor (or principal) of the young men''s department or a local clergyman, and ministers in training from neighboring Andover Theological Seminary often conducted evening prayer meetings. Particular fervor seems to have prevailed among Bradford''s female students, one of whom recalled the occasion on which her teacher singled out "all who loved the Saviour, to remain a few moments after the close of the school," and then pointed out to these young converts their "obligations and duties as Christians" to exert a good influence on their companions who had not yet experienced saving grace. The efforts of their elders combined with the zeal of adolescents ensured that religious revivals often set afire academies like Bradford, and students who had not yet received some inward assurance of salvation were pressed to strive toward that goal by both their teachers and their peers. Some found that atmosphere oppressive.

There was the poet Emily Dickinson, who kept her distance from a revival during her time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and avoided all organized religion for the rest of her life. But other young women welcomed the spiritual urgency that suffused academy life, and Martha Parker seems to have been among them. She spent her youth in an intensely pious household, her parents being pillars of the local Congregational church in the rural village of Dunbarton, New Hampshire. Martha, along with most of her siblings, came to join in that communion upon her "entertaining a hope in Christ"--experiencing the transformative "second birth" that, then as now, stands as the hallmark of evangelical spirituality. In Dunbarton''s meetinghouse, she would also have first heard the message that Christianity could offer a great deal to young women, a favorite theme of the village''s longtime minister, Walter Harris. From his sermons Martha would have learned that women as well as the twelve apostles "followed Jesus and ministered unto him." Indeed, as Harris pointed out, those early female followers had proved more faithful than most of the men, staying with him throughout his crucifixion and burial, a loyalty that Jesus rewarded by appearing first to Mary Magdalene. Thereafter, committed believers like Phoebe and Dorcas "took a very active part" in the early Christian community, and even the apostle Paul--no fan of women who stepped too far forward in defense of the faith--commended their service to the church.

Scripture itself thus showed to Harris''s satisfaction "that it is the will of our Lord, to make use of the exertions of women.in support of his cause." They should not, or course, exert themselves unduly: allowing women to preach was as remote from the mind of Dunbarton''s minister as he believed it was from that of the deity. Still, his including women in New Testament narratives on a basis of equality with men must have caught the attention and nurtured the piety of the village''s young women. Among them was one of Martha''s friends, an earnest thirteen-year-old when she embroidered a sampler to read, "Lydia Hacket is my name / English is my nation / Dunbarton is my dwelling place / And Christ is my salvation." But the most locally renowned of the village''s spiritual prodigies was Sally Ladd, a young woman only a few years older than Martha. After her death from tuberculosis in 1816, Sally became the subject of a pious memoir, one probably composed by Walter Harris himself. The little pamphlet did not circulate widely, but it celebrated Sally for recognizing "that she was in the hands of a God, who is ''angry with the wicked every day''&thin.