Mary Porter Gamewell

The Daughter of a Woman Physician

Mary Porter Gamewell was born on October 20, 1848, in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, USA. Her father was Nathaniel Porter; her mother, Maria Killingly Porter, was a practicing physician, which in that era was itself unusual. She had two sisters and two brothers. Part of her early education took place at home; she later went to school in Blairsville, Pennsylvania. In 1858 the family moved to Pittsburgh, and in 1860 to Davenport, Iowa, where she finished high school, graduating in 1868. For the next two years she taught at Grandview Academy in Iowa, where she had charge of a class in Latin.

One of Five

She was the first missionary sent out by the Western Branch of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the first the society sent to China. The weight of this "first" at the time is easy to grasp: the entire Woman's Foreign Missionary Society then had only five missionaries in the whole world, and she was one of them. In 1871 she set out from Davenport for Beijing.

Only One Pupil on Opening Day

She started a girls' school in Beijing, and when it opened she had enrolled only one girl. The school grew extremely slowly, and one reason was especially concrete: it was the first school in China to unbind the feet of its girls. At a time when bound feet were regarded as a mark of respectability, this step brought enormous prejudice, and many families would rather not send their daughters. She called the school the "Davenport School", after the city that had sent her out.

From One Pupil to One Hundred and Fifty

Against this resistance the school grew year by year. By the Boxer Uprising of 1900 it had 150 students on its rolls. Between the single pupil of opening day and those 150 lay nearly thirty years, the result of persuading one family after another and building up year after year.

The Siege of the Legations

When the Boxer Uprising broke out in 1900, the foreigners and Chinese Christians in Beijing withdrew into the Legation Quarter, where they were besieged for more than fifty days. Mary Porter Gamewell lived through the siege. Afterward her health steadily declined, and she died in the United States on November 27, 1906, at the age of fifty-eight. The girls' school she founded later became known as Muzhen Girls' School (慕贞女校) and became an important strand of girls' education in Beijing. It should be noted that Muzhen Girls' School belonged to the Methodist Episcopal Church, while the Congregationalist Bridgman Girls' School (贝满女校) was a different school, founded and led by different people; the two are often confused.