Charlotte "Lottie" Digges Moon (12 December 1840–24 December 1912), Baptist missionary, was born on her family's farm, Viewmont, in Albemarle County. The daughter of Edward Harris Moon, a wealthy merchant and enslaver, and Orianna Maria Barclay Moon, "Lottie" Moon, as she was known, attended Valley Union Seminary (later Hollins University) from which she graduated with a B.A. in 1858. She received an M.A. three years later from Albemarle Institute, in Charlottesville. An outstanding student of languages, she was proficient in Greek and Latin. Her father died in January 1853, and during the Civil War Moon assisted her widowed mother with managing Viewmont. After the war she taught at Caldwell Female Institute (later Centre College), in Danville, Kentucky, and in 1871 opened a high school for girls in Cartersville, Georgia, with one of her Caldwell colleagues.
Moon's parents were deeply involved in the Baptist faith and were instrumental in founding the Scottsville Baptist Church. She was not receptive to religion and was known for her irreverence and disdain for convention. In December 1858 she experienced a religious conversion and became dedicated to Christian missionary outreach. Moon's actions as an unmarried woman missionary, considered at the time bold for her class and status, were consistent with her family's values. Moon's father funded equal education for his daughters, and Moon's mother was considered a capable and effective administrator of the family farm after his death. Two of Moon's sisters were similarly groundbreaking. Oriana Russell Moon Andrews earned a medical degree in 1857 and Edmonia Harris Moon became one of the first unmarried women to be sent to China as a Baptist missionary in 1872.
In the nineteenth century, many American Christian groups dedicated themselves to foreign missionary outreach. In 1845 the Southern Baptist Convention, organized primarily to promote mission work, established the Richmond-based Southern Baptist Convention Foreign Mission Board (later the International Mission Board) and chose China as its first missionary endeavor. Southern Baptist Convention missionaries entered the country in 1846. While only sporadically tolerated by the Chinese government, and occasionally persecuted and even killed, these early missionaries preached the Christian gospel, established schools and churches, and attempted to secure converts to Christianity.
The Foreign Mission Board's practice was to send married couples on mission work to China. Lottie Moon argued for the viability of single women as missionaries in two 1871 articles published in the Religious Herald. Citing the example of Roman Catholic nuns and Episcopal deaconesses, she saw the work of Southern Baptist Convention women as "a latent power" and wrote: "Let the churches but make the experiment of appointing women to this work, and we believe that these would be the nuclei around which many women would be found willing to gather." The need for increased numbers of women missionaries became apparent as cultural mores dictated that only women could have access to women. If these women missionaries were successful, it was thought, the added benefit was that newly Christian Chinese women might also be instrumental in converting their families.
Moon was appointed a missionary to China in July 1873 and by the fall had joined her sister in Penglai (known at the time as Tengchow), in Shandong Province in eastern China, where they resided with a missionary couple. By 1876 Edmonia had become ill, and they returned home to the United States. Lottie Moon returned to China the following year to continue her missionary work. She initially wrote letters complaining of "heathen" Chinese hostility to westerners, and her first impression of the Chinese people included an acerbic assessment of their "narrow minds and degraded morals" as well as a lack of cleanliness and belief in superstition. With subsequent contact, however, these negative impressions faded, and Moon soon championed the Chinese with whom she worked and lived. She eventually wore Chinese clothes, regularly spoke the language, and lived as a Chinese in her home. While she advocated strongly for Chinese women regarding customs such as foot binding, marriage contracts, and sparse education—and was opposed to opium smoking—Moon was practical regarding the limits of western mores on the Chinese culture. In Foreign Mission Journal articles Moon acknowledged the great achievements of Chinese civilization and wrote admiringly of Chinese respect for learning and family life.
Moon initially taught in established missionary schools but became frustrated with the limits of such evangelical work. Her solution was to tour the countryside to meet with groups of Chinese women in an attempt to convert them. In 1876 she reported visits to eighty-eight villages, which required Moon to speak in Mandarin. These trips were arduous and often complicated by bad weather, poor accommodations, and scant food. Moon persisted and ultimately found the opportunity to preach more rewarding than teaching in a school. Southern Baptist Convention lore also reports the diminutive Moon (standing barely over four feet tall) often directly challenging Chinese hecklers and calling them to reconsider their scorn of Christianity.
By 1882 Moon was engaged to Crawford H. Toy, whom she had first met as a student at Albemarle Female Institute. A theology professor and strong advocate of female missionary work, Toy became interested in joining Moon in China. He deviated from Baptist doctrinal views on the Bible, however, and it is possible Moon did not share his beliefs. Moon may also have been disturbed that Toy's views would bar him from acceptance by the Foreign Mission Board and perhaps end her own missionary work. She eventually broke off the engagement and never married.
Members of the Southern Baptist Convention Foreign Mission Board increasingly objected to Moon's personal evangelical work, which involved preaching. Women were largely prohibited from speaking publicly to male and female audiences, but Moon continued to evangelize, even if men were occasionally in her audience. In 1883 Moon expressed more explicitly her beliefs regarding the role of unmarried women missionaries and their need for independence to pursue their work. In an article published in Woman's Work in China, Moon asserted, "What women have a right to demand is perfect equality in mission meetings with men," and she advocated that unmarried missionary women had the right to conduct evangelical work outside mission-sponsored schools as well as the right to live in their own homes.
Alarmed by Moon's contentions, the members of the China Committee of the Foreign Mission Board ruled in 1885 that unmarried women missionaries were not allowed to vote in missionary meetings. Objecting to the rule, she threatened to resign her post and return to the United States. As a popular figure in Southern Baptist circles, especially with women, it was apparent that Moon's resignation would have been detrimental to the Foreign Mission Board's reputation and its fundraising. The board reversed its decision.
In 1886 Moon moved to the larger, interior city of Pingdu (then known as Pingtu), in Shandong Province. Despite Foreign Mission Board regulations, she lived alone as she continued her work and founded a church there. Two years later she suggested the establishment of the Woman's Missionary Union, an organization devoted to recruiting women missionaries. That same year, the union launched a Christmas fundraising effort to support her work in Pingdu. The fund became a highly successful venture, subsidizing mission work and additional women missionaries who joined Moon in China. Her work in China extended across four decades, only interrupted to accompany her sister home in 1876, furloughs in 1892 and 1903, and an absence in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion.
Moon's religious dedication and her work as an unmarried woman missionary made her a revered figure. She wrote many articles and reports published in Southern Baptist Convention publications, maintained a voluminous correspondence with fellow missionaries and religious leaders, and, during her periodic furloughs, lectured to interested groups about her work. In an attempt to garner more financial support, her detailed reports outlined vividly the difficulties and rewards of being a missionary. Her challenges included periodic droughts and floods, civil wars, and epidemics of plague, cholera and smallpox. Moon used her mission salary to aid famine victims. While entrenched hostility toward foreign missionaries occasionally abated during her time in China, general suspicion towards outsiders was prevalent.
By the autumn of 1912 Moon's physical and mental health faltered. Delirious, frail, and showing signs of dementia, she agreed to return home for care. Attended by a missionary nurse, she boarded the steamship Manchuria to sail back to the United States. While the ship was moored in Kobe, Japan, Charlotte "Lottie" Digges Moon died on 24 December 1912. An official report of her death listed the causes as a carbuncle on the back of her ear, debility, and old age. Her remains were cremated and returned to her family, where they were interred in Crewe Cemetery in Nottoway County.
Lauded in a Foreign Mission Board memorial as "a queenly saint among missionaries," death only burnished the appeal of Lottie Moon. The renderings of her life and missionary work were often romanticized and occasionally fabricated, including the false contention that Moon had stopped eating in solidarity with the starving Chinese or had stopped eating in protest against the Foreign Mission Board's failure to send famine relief funds. These contributed to her being glorified as an exemplar missionary who suffered a Christian martyr's death.
Moon challenged tradition regarding the role and marital status of foreign missionaries, a challenge which intersected with an emerging women's movement within the Southern Baptist Convention. The service by women such as Moon helped establish women's leadership positions in their churches. Her life became the focus of Southern Baptist Convention women's committees and, through the 1913 Girls Auxiliary (later Girls in Action), the religious education of young girls. The Woman's Missionary Union of the Southern Baptist Convention continued the Christmas offering and in 1918 officially named the fund after Moon. Lifetime donations of more than $5 billion to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering continue to support mission work in the twenty-first century. The Episcopal Church added her name to its liturgical calendar with a designated feast day of 22 December. Among Lottie Moon's many honors, in Virginia there is a state historical highway marker in Nottoway County and her name is included on the Wall of Honor of the Virginia Women's Monument at Richmond's Capitol Square.
Sources Consulted: Catherine B. Allen, The New Lottie Moon Story (1980), portrait on 78; William R. Estep, Whole Gospel—Whole World: The Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1845–1995 (1994); correspondence in Keith Harper, ed., Send the Light: Lottie Moon's Letters and Other Writings (2002), third quotation on 5 and fourth quotation on 6; Regina D. Sullivan, Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China in History and Legend (2011); missionary work detailed in published annual proceedings of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1874–1912, International Mission Board Digital Collections, Richmond, Va.; articles by Moon in Religious Herald, 23 Mar., 13 Apr. (first and second quotations) 1871, Baptist Missionary Magazine 67 (1887): 128–130, and Woman's Work in China 7 (Nov. 1883): 47–55 (fifth quotation on 55), 8 (Nov. 1884): 32–33; Richmond Times-Dispatch, 6 June 1992, 12 Dec. 2015; obituaries and funeral accounts in Richmond News Leader, 16 Jan. 1913, 28 Jan. 1913, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 16 Jan. 1913, 28 Jan. 1913, and Richmond Virginian, 28 Jan. 1913; memorial in Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention (1913): 102–103 (sixth quotation); portrait on 112.
Photograph in Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention (1913).