Missionary Scientists, Explorers — And Don’t Forget The Women

If highly accomplished Bryn Mawr and Wellesley graduates couldn’t get jobs in the male-dominated sciences in early 20th-century America and Britain, they found another alternative: Board a steamer, then take a wagon, then mount a donkey, and eventually be welcomed with wide open arms at universities in China.

There these pioneers taught biology, mathematics, and pre-med. In the process, they helped to inspire and advance opportunities for Asian women.

That insight, along with all kinds of tasty historical tidbits, emerges in ​“Missionary Scientists and Explorers,” a tiny and informative exhibition in the rotunda of the Yale Divinity School Library on Prospect Street.

It is on display — books, artifacts, manuscripts, diaries, and photographs — during library summer hours, 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. through Oct. 1 in five vitrines, three in the rotunda and two upstairs in the library reading room. This is the show for you if you’re the kind of person who delights in learning that when the African explorer and missionary David Livingstone was found — as in ​“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” — his wife was not only found with him, but she on her own had traversed the Kalahari Desert. She was the first white woman to do so, and she did it twice.

Never mind that most of the universities where the women featured in the exhibit taught were Christian institutions, such as Ginling College in Nanjing, set up by mainly Protestant missionaries in the late 19th century.

You can tell how meaningful the women’s experiences were from looking at the photographs of the white women and their attentive students in the labs, reading their diary entries, and then reading their obituaries or late-life profile articles in sedate New England newspapers, written after the missionary women scientists had returned to the United States.

Several of the women featured in the exhibition returned to the United States at the time of the Communist Revolution in China. That was the case with Jane Dye, who taught for three decades with her husband at West China Union University in Chengdu.

I loved learning that Dye’s avocations were also scientific. In retirement, back in Philadelphia after three decades in China, she published a book, Bird Watching 1916 – 1949 in Chengdu. She not only identified and described 103 species, but helped promote more women attending college.

“We finally had the school made co-educational, but we were not allowed to have more women students than men,” she is quoted as saying in a local newspaper in Philadelphia.

That said, only a portion of the show is about women. The first two vitrines are dedicated to explorers from the 16th to 20th centuries, all male, beginning with the remarkable Jesuit priest and scientist Matteo Ricci.

In 1601 he became the first Westerner allowed to enter the Forbidden City in what was then called Peking. This wasn’t because of his charm or the persuasive case he made for Jesus among his Confucian hosts. The show’s informative labels tell us that the Chinese were most impressed with Ricci’s ability to predict solar eclipses.

George Barbour, a Scottish missionary and geology professor at Yenching University in Beijing in the 1920s, was associated with the discovery of Peking Man fossils, and Alice Boring, teaching biology at the same university, helped to expand Western knowledge of China’s reptiles and amphibians.

And upstairs in the display cases in the library’s reading room, you can see the London Daily Telegraph of July 3, 1872 — it’s a reproduction — that reports Henry Stanley finding David Livingstone, a superstar medical missionary and African explorer, whose disappearance had riveted the world, or at least the London part of it.

It turns out that Livingstone, among other ambitious pursuits such as finding the source of the Nile and trying to end some of the colonial wars ravaging Africa at the time, also came close to figuring out the relationship between malaria and mosquitoes.

Livingstone’s finding was the result of a contest organized by newspapers who sent journalist Henry Stanley to Africa to explore the explorer’s alleged ​“disappearance,” and also, of course, to sell newspapers.

That you learn so much more about Livingstone, and his wife Mary and their intrepid colleagues, is one of the modest yet important achievements of this exhibition.